• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1022 0

teens (some of whom are also pregnant). “I know where they’ve been, and I want to see them get to a good place too. I’m a totally different person now because my parents showed me tough love. But the biggest change of all was in my father. He had to own up to his own drinking problem and insecurities, and that has really changed our relationship. When I came home from rehab, he actually cried and told me he’d failed me, my mom, and my older brother. And then he hugged me—the first real hug I can remember. He cried too when my baby was adopted, but he told me he was proud of me for doing the right thing.”

If you find out your child is using drugs or abusing alcohol, now is the time for tough love . . . to give your child a future. Get your child some counseling. Get her into a rehab program. Don’t wait. Far too many teens have overdosed or killed themselves and others by drunk driving. Your child’s life is too precious to take chances.

Earrings

“My daughter is 8 and is dying to get her ears pierced. But I don’t think she’s quite ready for them . . . the pain or the responsibility.”

“My son showed up at the dinner table with a surprise—he got his ear pierced. His mom just about dropped the mashed potatoes when she saw it. He and his buddies did it together on a dare at the mall.”

Whether or not to allow your child to have pierced ears is an area where you as a parent simply need good judgment. Would you want your 9-year-old son to have an earring? Probably not. But if my son at age 15 or 16 wanted to have an earring, I guess I’d let him. It would be a molehill in life. Of course, I’d want to talk to my son about it first, since usually the reason children or teens want to get their ears pierced is because all their friends are doing it.

“But do you really want to be like everyone else?” is a good question to ask.

Frankly, I don’t, because when I look at “everyone else,” I don’t always like what I see. Once I went to a basketball game where everyone wore red. You know what I wore? A white T-shirt. I’ve done major presentations at black-tie events and fund-raisers—and I wore a Hawaiian shirt. Imagine—the only person in the place without a black tie, and I’m the speaker! When our teenage son, Kevin, was talking about getting an earring, I decided to see just how serious he was. So I raided my wife’s earring collection and showed up with an earring at the dinner table. Kevin’s desire for an earring ended very quickly when I declared that I was also going to enjoy wearing one.

It all comes down to this: are you going to major on molehills or save your big guns for the mountains? If your teenage son is going for a job interview at a more conservative workplace and discovers that he won’t get the job because he has an earring, that earring you hate may just disappear for the next job interview (ditto for your daughter who has decided she has to have 3 piercings in both ears).

Eating (in High Chairs and at Restaurants)

I just returned from having lunch with my 3-year-old grandson, Conner, and my 18-month-old granddaughter, Adeline. Let me just say up front that it’s nearly impossible to enjoy a lunch or get a word in edgewise when you take 2 toddlers out to a restaurant. As my daughter Krissy told me, “Dad, you did your good deed for the week.”

“I enjoyed this so much,” I told her, “that I’ll have to do it again . . . in a year.”

And we both laughed.

Since I have 5 children and now have grandchildren, I identify with moms in the throes of caring for little ones. When you’re a mom, your goal is sometimes simply to get through the day. Asking young children to sit for a period of time—or to sit at all—is a pretty tall task (especially for certain personality types). Every mom needs to know where her child’s threshold for sitting is. Pushing it past those boundaries (i.e., doing an hour lunch with girlfriends at a restaurant) is most likely asking for trouble. Getting takeout and going to a park where your children can run is probably a better option. And your girlfriends will thank you.

Young children especially