Crime and Punishment

This blog is dedicated to all those parents out in 2o2p-land…

Last night I arrive home after a fairly benign day at the office to a problem with my 11 year old son. He was sent up the street three doors by my wife to fetch his younger sister and brother from a friends house in the neighborhood, and to walk them home since it was already near total darkness outside. Problem starts when he walks in the door solo, and just walks right pass my wife in the kitchen. Turns out he went over, told them to come home, but neglected to follow through with the second half of making sure they got home safely. The reason we’re asking him for these types of favors, and others, is at 11 years old, we want to start building a sense of responsibility and trust with him so we can start allowing him a greater sense of freedom in ways such as leaving him home alone while we drop one of the others off at sports, etc. Unfortunately, he didn’t cut the mustard this time.

Seems pretty standard fare eh? Well, that’s only the tip of the iceburg. Before dinner, I sat down with him on the couch he was pouting on (since he wasn’t taking well to being told he didn’t follow through on what his mother asked) and wanted to let him know why we were upset…for the reasons I just outlined. Well, he wouldn’t have any of it. Excuse after excuse after excuse started flowing from his mouth as to why it wasn’t his fault he left the other two to walk home alone, rather than just owning up to it, and learning from it. That’s where things started to go downhill in a hurry. In my minds eye, for him to learn from it, he needed to acknowledge his fault in the situation. Failing to do so just makes it likely to repeat. So I’m talking with him, and he’s getting more and more defensive, to the point where he starts saying some really stupid shit. So I get up, and tell him “when you’re ready to talk to me about this in real terms, we’ll continue this” – which got me a “fine…we won’t ever have that talk” response. Dad’s blood pressure then jumped 50 points. Straight to the room he goes crying his eyes out – right as dinner gets put on the table.

Five minutes pass and I can hear the crying stop, so I figure he’s ready to come down and eat so he can make his basketball practice 30 minutes down the road. So I go up and ask him to come down, to which I get a “I’m not eating dinner.”. Internally, my voice goes “Like Hell you’re not…”. See, we’ve had incidents before when he’s pulled that stunt, and we let him go to bed without eating. Problem is he’s then woken up the next day and played the “Ohhh…I’m feeling faint”, “I’m soooo dizzy” drama on us, so I have vowed never again. I tell him he’s going downstairs, and he will eat dinner because of those past incidents that I will never relive or force my wife to relive. He digs his heels in, and re-iterates that he’s not hungry, and isn’t going downstairs.

Dad’s blood pressure jumps another 50 points.

We have two basic ground rules in our house with our kids. #1 - They will never lie to us. I was a compulsive liar growing up, and I regret every one I ever told to my parents. I am willing to go to any length to ensure that my kids don’t feel the need to do that to us. And #2 – I expect our kids to respect my wife and myself. This is where I felt violated in his attempt to blatantly disobey me. When asked if he thinks he can actively disobey me, I get the standards “I don’t know…”. I let him know that he’s treading on very dangerous grounds, and is doing something against one of those two cardinal rules that he knows very, VERY well. Does he care? Nope.

Sooo…it comes now to another lesson of action and consequence. I tell him that if he decides to continue to disobey me and stay upstairs rather than go downstairs and eat dinner with the family, he looses his Xbox 360 Save Games. See – let me tell you about my eldest son a tad – he’s a gaming addict – even more so than his father (and that’s saying something). It’s to a point where both myself and my wife have said to eachother it’s a problem, but we haven’t been good enough parents to start putting in some regulations yet (YET – back to this in a few). So we have told him that, were he to ever blantately lie to us again (he’s done it in the past, and we’ve caught him cold), or openly disrespect us akin to what we see on those Supernanny TV shows – his save games are gone. Not just losing the privledge to play the 360 for X number of days – the saves are deleted. So, back to my ultimatum with him…I thought it would pay off.

I was wrong.

I sat stunned as he replied “I’m not hungry”. So I stand up from the bed I was sitting, and go downstairs. I crank up the volume on the sound system, and fire up the system making sure he can hear the start-up. Wait a minute or two, then go up and ask him to follow me down to the living room. There, sitting the the TV, is his gamer profile at the “Move/Delete” option. I tell him once more “This is your last chance – do you want to sit down and eat, or do you want to lose your profile and your save games?”

“I’m not hungry.”

So, I did it. And I felt physically ill when I was doing it. The story goes on for another hour and a half after that, as we sit down and get through to him finally. He’s as stubborn as both his parents, so it’s a feat to get through, but we finally did. We heard everything from “I’m never coming out of my room” to “I’ll never forgive you” and everything in between. But ultimately we got to a point where he understood (at least we hope) a bit more why we do what we do, and that it’s because we love him and want to make sure he’s a good person as he grows up and has his own family. We talk about how important the games have become to him, and that we’re worried. So we agreed to institute a “Pay For Play” type of system – where the kids will earn play time on the 360, or the computers, or the DSs by doing work around the house, getting good grades, or other signs of responsibility and/or caring for one another. I’ll keep ya’ updated on how that goes…

Anyhoo…long, long story – so sorry for that. But it feels good to write it down and have a second chance to see what we did last night as parents and know that – even though it hurt both my son and myself – it was the right thing to do. I lived through a time when gaming was more important than just about anything in my life – and it almost tore my family apart. I won’t ever have my kids (namely my two sons) let gaming affect them like it did me. That starts today.

B.