I've Had It Up to Here with Teenagers Read online

  Parenting is the hardest job in the world. Period. The logistics are mind-boggling. Believe me when I tell you that it is not one bit of fun to be in charge of other people’s dental hygiene, doctor visits, sports injury rehabilitation, clothing, money, schoolwork, and the thousand other things you have no idea you’re signing up for when they hand you that nine-pound bundle at the hospital, roll you in a wheelchair to the front door, and tell you to toddle on home. I never in my life thought I would have to tell someone with bigger feet than my own, “You have to cut your toenails today.”

  There is no more humbling work on the face of the earth than being a mother. The chauffeuring services alone are enough to turn off most prospective parents. In addition to the work itself, which is hard enough, it’s all uphill. Teenagers do not appreciate what their parents do until much, much later in life. They do not have a positive attitude or a pleasing disposition a lot of the time. Nobody who is doing a good job of it has an easy time raising teenagers. That’s such a shame. It shouldn’t be that way. It doesn’t have to be that way. Sadly, it usually is that way.

  Here’s the punch line: it’s all worth it. I’m telling the truth. That’s how God gets you. Once you count those little fingers and toes, smell that newborn head, and feel the weight of that baby in your arms, you’re hooked. No matter how hard the future is, you never regret having children. You love them no matter what. I don’t know how that works, but it’s true. I always tell my kids that even if they go to prison, I’ll visit them and bring brownies. That doesn’t mean I’ll condone whatever crime sent them there. But I’ll never stop loving them. Never. That doesn’t mean I have to like the little suckers all the time, however. I don’t. Parental love is fierce and illogical. I think it is the strongest force on earth. It trumps everything, thank God: mounds of laundry, sleepless nights, hard stadium seats, endless recitals, broken hearts, losing seasons, throw-up viruses, bad grades, poor choices, and everything else life throws at teenagers and their parents. In the end, when nothing else connects you to your teen, and you seem to be worlds apart, love remains. That’s the saving grace.

  THE NOT-SO-SWEET SOUNDS OF TEEN ’TUDE

  1.“You don’t understand anything!”

  2.“It’s not that big of a deal, Mom.”

  3.“I’ll do it tomorrow.”

  4.“Nobody cares but you.”

  5.“It won’t cost anything.”

  6.“I don’t have any homework.”

  7.“Somebody must have stolen it.”

  8.“You can check me out. We’re not doing anything in school today.”

  9.“I hate it/that/them/him/her!”

  10.“Nobody writes thank-you notes anymore.”

  11.“There’s nothing to eat in this house!”

  12.“I turned it in for sure.”

  13.“I just found out about it.”

  14.“I need another check.”

  Do I Have to

  Pay for That?

  To teenagers, money is an abstract concept. They can count money as skillfully as professional football bookies, of course. It’s not about the math. The problem is that the sums don’t mean much because there is no real-life context for them. Teenagers have no experience with agonizing decisions such as, “Should I pay the mortgage or the dentist’s bill first?” Like sex and death, budgeting is something you have to experience firsthand to appreciate fully. Of course, most teenagers do not earn money or support themselves in any meaningful way. That is as it should be in our society. However, this means that teenagers understand money only theoretically. As every adult knows, it’s a long way from Monopoly money to real-life cash.

  In teenagers’ minds, all the money the family brings in is split between two giant pots of dollar bills at the end of the rainbow. One pot contains money that belongs to parents. Teens have a vague understanding that parents use this money to pay bills. Lord knows, they hear enough about that. Just ask your teenagers how often they’ve been told, “That’s too expensive!” or “We can’t afford that!”

  How many times have you asked your teenager, “What did you do with the twenty I gave you yesterday?” My teens cannot seem to grasp the concept of change. I do not remember ever receiving any change from cash I have doled out to them, no matter how small or large the initial request was. They squirrel away my change in their back pockets like they expect to be asked to pay a poll tax at any moment. Teenagers bank (literally) on parents forgetting to ask for their change. My guess is that this is a good ploy. I bet it pays off more often than not. To combat the lack-of-change con game, I keep stacks of ones and fives like a purse-carrying drug dealer. I will give my child seven ones to go through a drive-through rather than the ten-spot most parents fork over without a second thought. I’m cheap. I have to be. We are on a tight budget. I’d love to be cavalier about small expenditures. Who wouldn’t? I feel sure I’d be a genuinely delightful rich person. Unfortunately, I do not see that happening anytime soon.

  My teens know that asking me for money while I am sitting at my desk paying bills is like poking a tiger with the barbecue tongs. Just interrupting me with a question is likely to bring on a tirade about the family budget, college tuition plans, federal income tax, the national debt, and the perils of late credit card payments. I can barely add and subtract without a calculator, so it might result in a balance-the-checkbook-for-Mama math assignment, too. No teenager in my house would make an amateur mistake like being in the same room when I am suffering through a bill-paying morning. When word leaks out that Mom is paying bills downstairs, my teenagers run like they’re minors fleeing a bar with mai tais in their hot little hands during a police raid.

  I feel fairly confident my teenagers understand that money earned by my husband and me is used to pay for such trifles as food, clothing, shelter, gas, insurance, orthodontist bills, and donations to the needy—luxuries like that. I’ve certainly explained it often enough. I am convinced they simply find such mundane matters beneath their interest. I get the feeling that they feel the family budget is not their problem. It is only when the budget affects them personally—their ability to go on spring break with friends or buy a prom dress that costs more than my entire maternity wardrobe, for example—that I can capture their interest in the ebb (trickle of incoming money) and flow (flood of outgoing money) of family finances. I think comedian Bill Cosby said it best when he told his teenagers, “I am rich. You have nothing.”

  The second pot of gold at the end of a teenager’s rainbow holds money that is deemed to be the sole property of the teen. Unlike the money used by parents to pay bills, money teenagers hoard like greedy goblins is theirs. They have strong emotional ties to it. In their minds, it is their birthright, as if they are minor-league royals living on an allowance from the queen. (I understand that HRH Queen Elizabeth is famous for her thriftiness. I say, good for the old bag! She may be one of the richest women on the planet, but she has some serious upkeep with those castles.) Teens are positively miserly with their own money. Any contributions they make toward joint family presents or outings are reluctantly coughed up, at best. Teens ante-up only when driven to it by guilty consciences.

  Considering how free and easy they are with my money, my kids are shockingly stingy with their own. They dribble out any money they have to pay one dollar at a time. On the rare occasions when I ask them for cash to tip the pizza delivery man, they scowl heavily and produce the money only after I sign an IOU promising prompt repayment with interest.

  I swear teens are like bankers from hell. Their money is comprised of an allowance, birthday and holiday gifts, and the occasional payment for jobs performed during the summer, during Christmas break, and on a cash-poor-emergency-weekend-money-needed basis. To be clear: my teens have some jobs they must perform without any financial compensation at all. As members of a family, everyone does some chores for the common good, things like making beds, changing sheets, picking up a younger sibling from school or an activity, and taking out the trash—small jobs lik
e that. And of course, any job performed while a teen is grounded at our house is, by definition, reparation for a crime or a shortfall in character. I don’t pay a penny for jobs performed by prison inmates.

  In short, in a teenager’s mind, there is “my money” and “your money.” “My money” belongs to the teen. “Your money” belongs to the parents. In a family, there is always some tension over the disbursement of discretionary income. Since parents work to earn every dollar they bring in to the household to support the little parasites they gave birth to, they assume—quite rightly, I think—that their discretion should determine how the few measly dollars left over after paying bills are spent. As you might expect, teenagers often disagree with those choices. To be fair, it’s hard for anyone to get excited over a new water line that sucks up every extra penny in the family budget.

  Teenagers always feel that they should spend their pocket money any way they see fit, without any supervision at all. If my daughter chooses to blow the equivalent of the GNP of a small nation on a pair of boots that will go out of style in six months, she feels strongly that I should be supportive of her idiotic choice. If my son chooses to spend his entire stash of Christmas cash on sunglasses he will wear to the pool one time (true story) before they are stolen, I am expected to keep my opinion about that lunacy to myself. As far as I am concerned, they might as well lean out the car window and scatter twenty-dollar bills on the highway. What a waste!

  From a teenager’s point of view, it all comes down to one question: “Am I paying for this, or are you?” Teens prefer that parents use funds from their own less interesting pot of gold for boring things like car insurance, medicine, and groceries. That leaves more money in the teens’ pot of gold for eating out, going to movies and concerts, and otherwise entertaining themselves in the grand style to which they have become accustomed.

  Speaking of that grand style, my husband and I realized a few years ago that we made one (okay, more than one, but I’m writing about only this one right now) big parenting mistake with our children. We created entitlement monsters. We didn’t mean to do it. It was an accident—an oversight, really. Somehow, we gave our kids the impression that they reside in a very nice resort. In this resort, my husband and I are the support staff. The kids have no need to worry about expenses. They can just flash their key cards. They can order whatever they want in the resort restaurant. Cost is of no concern. They don’t have to worry about lost or broken iPods, cell phones, or winter coats because all they need to do is report the loss to the staff, which will handle everything from there. Summer camp, braces, musical instruments, concert tickets, birthday presents for friends, sports equipment/uniforms, trips, tutorials, vacation money, trendy clothes, salon haircuts, acne products, concession food—the list goes on ad nauseam, or until we slam the till closed.

  (This seems a good time for an aside: While compiling my pitiful list of tax deductions for my accountant this year, I learned for the first time that the IRS graciously allows parents to claim their children over the age of eighteen as dependents as long as they provide over half their support. That made me chuckle. How many eighteen-year-olds do you know who support themselves single-handedly? I can’t think of a single one. A summer job or a part-time job is a big help, but it isn’t enough to keep the average teenager in shower gel for a year. And while I’m on this soapbox, why isn’t college tuition completely tax deductible? Isn’t it in society’s best interest to make it as easy as possible for parents to pay for college? Sometimes, I feel like the federal government has it in for me. It often makes it harder for me to do the right thing for my kids. I think the feds should be on my side! Don’t you agree?)

  We had a staff meeting at our house to discuss the monetary entitlement issues with regard to our guests/teenagers. We have no one to blame but ourselves. We’re raising these kids. The buck stops here (pun intended). We’re working our fat fannies off (I wish) night and day to make sure we get our kids to every school activity, in addition to their after-school extravaganzas. We pay for everything. We volunteer. We show up to support them. We stay up late to make sure they’re safely home from their all-important social engagements. We get up early and jump on the treadmill again every single morning, no matter how tired we are.

  My husband and I don’t have a lazy bone in our bodies. How could we have raised children who feel perfectly comfortable with our working ourselves half to death to support their iTunes habits while they treat us like resort staff? I’ll give you two examples. I could provide a hundred. I have actually vacuumed around a teen who did not even pause while watching a football game and texting at the same time to pick his feet up so I could clean underneath them. I have staggered into my house buried under a sea of grocery bags in full view of my children, who not only did not jump up to help but actively moaned and groaned when I yelled at them to get the heck up and unload the car. What kind of humans treat others like that? How could we have raised children who are that selfish? My husband and I are nice people. We really are.

  Furthermore, my kids think they live in a five-star resort and that they are entitled to that level of housekeeping, kitchen, and car service. To add insult to injury, they think their eighteen-year stay at our very fine resort should be fully funded by the staff. That’s right. Our kids think we should do all the work and pay for everything. You know what my teenagers believe is the sum total of their familial obligations? They think they should go to school and make good grades. Well, of course they should do that. That’s the minimum requirement of guests here at Chez Thompson. But that’s not all they should do. Parents are people, too, you know. We need a manifesto. I volunteer to write one.

  Whoa.

  After our two-person emergency staff meeting (which represents a very low employee-to-guest ratio for a five-star facility—no wonder I’m so tired), my husband and I decided to make some changes. We’re always fine-tuning our parenting plan. There’s nothing we relish more than a good ambush. Our family is a work in progress.

  We decided to make a family announcement: “We don’t work for you anymore.”

  The announcement was not popular. The previous arrangement worked well for them, our teenagers explained. They saw no need for change.

  “Tough tuna,” we responded.

  While I was glad my kids enjoyed their years lolling around the French Riviera, they were now going to experience resort services along the lines of those found in Third World border-town hostels. We, the hardworking staff, will continue to provide food, shelter, water, gas, electricity, and medical services on an as-needed basis. Everything else is to be determined.

  “We’re going to simplify things!” we announced. We explained how we needed to streamline our finances and become more budget-minded. It worked well for Southwest Airlines, and it could work for us, too. I even offered to throw in some free flight attendant humor. (I actually laughed out loud once when a Southwest attendant told passengers to “get the heck off now” at the end of a long flight I was on from Phoenix to Alabama.)

  “This does not sound good,” one of my sons muttered to his brother. He’s our oldest child; he was suspicious right off. That boy is quick.

  I am not good with money. Everyone knows it. When I get back home after selling my own books at speaking events, I open a big bag of M&Ms as an incentive before I figure out the sales taxes I have to pay. I feel inadequate teaching my teenagers about money. But like every other important life skill, I still have to teach it. None of us is born understanding how to budget, you know.

  I decided to ask my British friend who is brilliant with money for help. She’s raised two wonderful girls who were my kids’ babysitters. They turned out well. (It’s always good to see finished products that work well in the marketplace.) Her girls have had their own checking accounts since they were twelve years old. (I know it sounds impossible. I told you she’s good.) My friend is a mean mama like me, so we’re generally on the same page in reassuring one another about how right we are and h
ow wrong the rest of the world is.

  We set up a meeting, greased it with a glass of wine, and drew up a battle plan.

  I said, “They can’t do it. They won’t do it.”

  She said, “Of course, they can. And yes, they will.”

  I protested louder. “I’m telling you, it won’t work! My kids won’t stick to the budget! They’ll spend all their money up front! They’ll bounce checks. I shudder to imagine what they’ll do with debit cards. One of them might go to jail! It will end up being something else I have to police. You don’t know my teenagers! They’ll find a loophole, and I’ll end up bailing them out!”

  “You must stand firm,” she said. “This will work.”

  When someone says that to you with a British accent, it sounds better than it would in regular American English. I decided to give it a try.

  First, my husband and I had a financial summit on the porch. He was initially skeptical. He’s never had the respect I do for the British. We fine-tuned my friend’s plan, made it more boy-friendly, and beefed up the consequences section of the allowance contract.

  Then we met with our kids. From their protests, you’d think we were dividing up postwar Europe at Yalta. To this day, my teens call the plan “the British Invasion.”

  Guess what? We’ve had some bumps (and one major crater) along the way, but the plan has worked overall. Giving them control over their own entertainment budgets cut down on a lot of arguing. No one has gone to jail. Yet. When their money is gone, it’s gone—just like in real life.

  “This stinks!” one of my kids said when he ran out of money.

  “Well, yeah,” I agreed. “I hate it, too. That happens to me all the time.”

  YOURS, MINE, AND OURS

  1.“If I have to pay for it with my own money, I don’t want it.”

  2.“My brother ate half of my fries, so he should pay half.”