One of the easiest things in the world to do is to spoil your children. It can be a product of lazy parenting, inconsistent parenting, or simply clueless parenting. In my experience, there are few things in the world more difficult to endure than the machinations of a spoiled child.
One parent in Pasadena has apparently decided that enough is enough. After helping to create the problem to begin with, he and his wife have determined that the time has come to teach their children a lesson. It’s perhaps not what you and I might have done, but at least they’re trying to do the right thing.
There’s not much laughter today at the home of a Pasadena information technology specialist who has decided to auction off his sons’ Christmas presents √≥ and possibly dismantle the family tree √≥ because the youngsters, ages 9, 11 and 15, have been naughty, not nice.
“One thing we teach around this house,” said the man, who asked that his name not be revealed, “is that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.”
In a Christmas context, bad people get switches or lumps of coal ó or lose the presents they want the most.
“BAD CHILDREN get no Nintendo DS. Santa will skip our house this year,” the man announced in his eBay posting to sell three DS systems with PictoChat and Metroid. Also offered were three games for use with the system. “No kidding. Three undeserving boys have crossed the line. Tonight we sat down and showed them what they WILL NOT get for Christmas this year. I’ll be taking the tree down tomorrow.”….
“These are normally really good kids,” he said. But in a single day, he added, the boys fought one another, used vulgar language and gestured obscenely. The family discord has been in progress for about two weeks, said the man, attributing it, in part, to the laxness of previous discipline.
“It seems like we’d say what we were going to do, then bend and back off a little,” the father, 41, said. “We’d ground them for a week, but they’d really be grounded for three days; we’d take away video games, but they would still watch television. … It decayed to the point that groundings don’t work, putting them in their room, timeouts don’t have any effect.”….
The man said he and his wife announced the possible punishment in a family meeting earlier this week.
“We told them to think about what kind of brothers they were being, how they were treating their parents and what kind of men they were going to grow up to become,” he said. “We told them they were destroying each other and the calm and peace in the household. It had to stop.”
The boys pledged to reform, he said, but were back at their rowdy ways the next morning.
At some point, a parent has to be willing to teach their children a lesson, no matter how much pain it might cause them in the short term. If it means hitting them where it hurts (figuratively speaking, of course), so be it. If the goal is for our children to grow up to be kind, respectful, mature human beings, sometimes the lessons have to be harsh.
It would be easy to sit here and second-guess these parents. If only the had been consistent from the beginning…if only they hadn’t been so lazy in their parenting…. You and I might have taken a different approach, but if taking back the children’s Christmas toys sends the message and teaches the desired lesson, the end result will make it all worthwhile. Christmas is about more than toys, after all.
I wish these parents well. They’ve got their work cut out for them.
