JustAdvice

When the pro­ba­tion offi­cer returned from lunch, Mrs. R. had left another voice mail mes­sage on his tele­phone. She was always double-dealing regard­ing her daugh­ter, who was on pro­ba­tion for theft. He had no desire to hear the lat­est scheme, but he dialed the num­ber anyway.

” I need to tell you some­thing I know I should have told you before,” said Mrs. R., “but I didn’t want to get Sara in trou­ble.” She con­tin­ued by say­ing, “Sara was gone for three nights about a week ago, and when she came back home she was so sorry, and so nice, that I thought it was best to just let it go.”

The truth was, she was afraid to cross the girl because it would mean a tantrum and Mrs. R. didn’t want to have to deal with it. She never had dealt with the tantrums, which was why Sara was so good at them. Mrs. R. knew she should have reported the vio­la­tion, but insisted she was only try­ing to pro­tect Sara from hav­ing to go back to Juve­nile Court, where “some­thing worse” might hap­pen. It was all for her own good, you see.

The tac­tic hadn’t worked, of course, and now she had more infor­ma­tion for the pro­ba­tion offi­cer, with a tricky lit­tle con­di­tion she wanted to impose. It was a clas­sic exam­ple of a par­ent refus­ing to be the Heavy, no mat­ter how much the sit­u­a­tion required it.

“Please don’t tell Sara I told you this, but I know she has been see­ing Jaime again. They are together when she cuts school and that’s who she was with when she was gone those three days. She knows the Judge said she isn’t sup­posed to asso­ciate with that boy but she doesn’t lis­ten when I try to say any­thing, so I want you to talk to her. Just make sure you don’t let on that I’m the one who told you.”

Mrs. R.’s request is a famil­iar tac­tic and is often employed by par­ents who are afraid to meet their children’s mis­be­hav­ior head-on. They insist that we should keep secret the fact that they “told” on their off­spring and they jus­tify the request with excuses like, “She would be really furi­ous if she knew I told, and then she would be impos­si­ble,” or “She would never trust me again, if she thought I was the one who told you.” It is a piti­ful attempt to avoid incon­ve­nience and unpleas­ant­ness, and it encour­ages bad behav­ior because it only serves to pla­cate it. It also turns par­ents into noth­ing more than their children’s roommates.

Par­ents are not their children’s pals. Their role is more solid and more demand­ing than that. A good parent/child rela­tion­ship can weather all the storms of ado­les­cence if the par­ents are brave enough to take charge, deal openly and hon­estly with their chil­dren and do the right thing, even when it means the kids don’t like it.

When par­ents are con­sis­tently doing the right thing, there are invari­ably times when their chil­dren are unhappy with them. That’s nat­ural. They’ll get over it – a lot faster, in fact, than it would take them to recover from the ruina­tion of their lives.