Peter Rook: on the resourceful teenager
Last week I wrote about the voyage of discovery that is dealing with not one, but two teenagers.
Last week I wrote about the voyage of discovery that is dealing with not one, but two teenagers.This week, I'd like to examine the ability of the teenager to think up devious, creative and downright entrepreneurial ways of extracting cash from our shrinking bank balance.
If only they would apply such thought and resourcefulness to their geography homework.
Now we all know that kids keep you poor. However, as doting parents, we willingly sacrifice holidays to the Seychelles, designer clobber and accounts with the local masseuse for spending on our sprogs. After all, their happiness ensures our happiness, right?
That's all well and good when they're primary school age, but when they become teenagers you can no longer fob them off with a bag-full of shrapnel for the 2p cascades at the Hunstanton amusement arcade. Their monetary demands inflate in direct disproportion to their communication skills.
They have become money-grasping, sulking, guilt-tripping teens and you have officially been transformed into a walking ATM cash dispenser spewing out fivers to still their whining or compensate for the fact that you were too busy with work to attend last Sunday's under-14s football match.
To be honest, we can hardly blame them when we are all guilty of cultivating our children in the values of bribery and instant reward.
Nowadays, there are special payments being made to encourage kids to do A-levels (or at least just turn up to class – "no-one actually said anything about doing any work"), and revelations that some headteachers are offering 500 cash bonuses to pupils who pass exams.
Some schools even reward kids with gold stars for spelling their name correctly these days. OK, so I made that last bit up, but you get my drift.
Having long given up the stick i.e. the cane, schools are discovering the carrot – though not the old carrot of getting to university and one day being an accountant with your own car, children and holiday abroad, but another sort of carrot, the only carrot we understand these days, the carrot of having everything this minute, right now.
In my day (blimey I have reached the stage where I'm starting sentences with the words "in my day", just like me dad before me), the reward for attending classes and performing to the best of my ability was not getting a throttling. Now we (and by "we" I include me) and our education system throws money and gifts at them for the flimsiest of achievements.
Maybe instead of giving them cash for passing exams the schools should think about rewarding them with things such as contraceptives, deodorants and a guide to communicating without recourse to the grunt.
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Friday 12 March 2010
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