Kids.... Teenagers... Young Adults

Friday night, I attended a fundraiser for an educational scholarship program. The basic idea is to create a fund that students can use to continue to attend college. There were five or six students who were ready to graduate and had benefited from the program. They all acknowledged that without the fund, they would have been unable to attend college.

As always, there was excellent food, wonderful music and great company.

Something came up in our discussion that night. There were probably ten of us to a table and the conversation gradually warmed up as we got comfortable with each other and stopped talking only with the people we knew.

We got on the topic of kids, how they have a drive and motivation and how some seem to bloom very late.

One of the people at the table was a 24-year-old woman who never opened her mouth once through the entire program and sat sullenly with an iPod stuck in her ears, tuning all of us out.

Her situation, in short, is that she lives with her mother, has only had one job in her life and has not gone to college. She basically spends all day at home on the Internet. She's snarly and disrespectful to her mother who, by the way, paid for her to be there.

Later I had a private conversation with someone about what we each would do if we had a kid like that.

Here's my plan: I would disconnect the Internet. First thing. She would not be able to sit on the Internet all day. I would make it very clear that she is expected to get a job. At 24, she's already past the point where I would provide an education for her. She'd need to do it another way. Grants, scholarships, loans ~ whatever she decided. I'd provide housing only.

One thing is clear. I would not totally support an able-bodied 24-year-old.

I'll grant you that I lean more toward "tough love" when it comes to those kinds of things. I would have been a very strict parent. Compassionate and caring, of course ~ but there are certain standards of behavior I would expect. Cultural considerations aside, I believe kids need to develop something on their own. If they want to continue living at home, that's great ~ but they need to be contributing to the family.

If she has a medical or psychological problem, of course I wouldn't toss her out on her ear ~ but she would be expected to follow medical directions or see a counselor regularly. Hopefully, those needs would be apparent before she got to that age though.

As for the iPod, there's no way in pluperfect hell any kid of mine would have one at that age if she didn't have a job. And she wouldn't have been listening to it at a public event. I would have told her to take it out and put it away. There were people her age at the table ~ so it's not that she didn't have any company in her own age range.

Parental laziness does a kid no favors. Providing everything they might want so they have no motivation to contribute to the family income is called enabling and it will never serve the kid well. I wonder about that sometimes because I've met so many parents who allow their kids to remain adolescent until their mid-20s. It might be the easier road but there are karmic implications for not giving a child what he or she needs to provide for themselves and their families. When we have children, we are expected to teach them and guide them. No kid should have to leave home without benefit of an education, an understanding of household finances, how to use credit, how to manage a bank account, how to cook and how to take care of basic life issues. I would also hope they have some foundational values to make choices and decisions. Ultimately they might choose values different than mine. As impossible as it is to believe, not every human being has an attraction to Thai culture (ahem) ~ but they need something. When we get hit in the head with the big stuff, we need something to fall back on and guide us.

What do you think? What would you do with such a 24-year-old as I've described?

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