troubling kid stuff; unexpected Siren

[sistawendy]

M'boy lost his phone for the umpteenth time a couple of days ago, only to find it last night under a towel.
Me: Where is your phone supposed to go when you're not using it?
Wendling: On my bookshelf.
Me: Was the towel on your bookshelf?
W: ...
Me: Uh huh.
W: It was an accident!
Me: It was carelessness, [Wendling]. There's a difference.
W: It was an accident! They just happened.
Me: It was easily preventable.
The dude cannot. Accept. Responsibility. For even his own (important and not difficult) stuff. This is worrisome and it needs to stop. Good grief, the boy he can vote now.

Sure, I get that he's tired of his parents et al. riding him all the time. But that won't stop until he gets it together.

---

Picked up the Siberian Siren from the airport last night as arranged yesterday afternoon. She'd just come back from a few days in L.A., which she loves. She's even talking about setting up shop down there, now that she's in the middle of moving into a new place near Capitol Hill station* with her nearly-new sweetie. I told her that she is not allowed to move down there on a permanent basis, but she tends to get stuff done. I wouldn't be surprised if the City of Angels, someday soon, doesn't know what hit it.

She congratulated me on my MBSOs,** saying that I'm more lesbian than she is in this respect. As flattering as that may be, I had to tell her that I have the apparently unfair advantage of a prostate, or as ionan put it, a P-spot.

It occurs to me that I'd love to take some of the Siren's abundance of executive function and give it to my son. Le sigh.



*Opening 1Q2016. Aw, yeah. I can take the train from right next to work to the SS, Funny Lady, assorted queer spots, Lambert House, my spiritual home, etc.
**Mind-blowing squirty orgasms. Aw, yeah.

Comments

[ximinez]

> W: It was an accident! They just happened.

Do you know any pilots, pro or amateur? See if one of them will talk to him about how there are no such thing as accidents. I immediately think of pilots, because whenever there is an "accident", the NTSB investigation almost always traces it back to not just one, but a series of mistakes or negligent inactions by people who were otherwise responsible.

In this case, he did at least three things wrong that I can immediately identify.

1. He put his phone down somewhere it did not belong. (Mistake.)
   
2. Later (perhaps not much later), he put a towel down somewhere (Presumably mistake, since it probably needs to get hung up.) without looking at where he was putting it. (Neglect.)

Another parental lecture is probably not going to solve the problem, but one can hope that getting him to see it this way will get him thinking about it. Assuming he doesn't spend the whole time arguing with you about it, like my daughter does.

[ivy]

I think that works the best when it's a culture that is modeled. When everyone around you does it as peers, it's easy to participate and get in the habit of thinking "how could I have prevented this?". When you're in a regular environment where few people want to blame themselves for things that don't go as planned, it's harder to get someone to ride responsibility herd on themselves, because humans don't want to take blame, and no one else seems to be doing it. And so if the only person suggesting this approach is an authority figure, well, most teenagers aren't going to like that. Other than making some pilot friends his own age, or an environment of similar peer-pressure responsibility, this is a tough one to solve. (I see it mostly in Search and Rescue, and how we try to model it for our youth outreach parts of the program. But I think it works there because *everyone* does it, and it's clearly better to be warm, fed, dry, and knowing where you are than it is to be wet, cold, hungry, and lost, which is what happens if you don't take responsibility for your actions and do smart things. So we have both group culture *and* Maslow-level happiness reinforcement helping. I imagine it's similar with pilots.)

[ximinez]

Maybe that's why it feels like I'm beating my head against a wall. :)

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I could use some of that executive function, too.

[staxxy.livejournal.com]

along with learning how to not put his phone where it can be lost, perhaps he needs to learn how to find his phone when it is not where he expect it to be. Calling or texting or otherwwise causing it to make a sound so he can put it where it should go.

Problem solving after one has made a mistake is just as important and learning to not make mistakes of carelessness.

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

That crossed my mind. Then I remembered that his phone is often out of juice.

[staxxy.livejournal.com]

which leads to another "good practices" object lesson. ;)

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

If I had a nickel for every time I'd said something like, "Plug your phone in every night," I'd be doing nothing but Burning Man prep right now.

[staxxy.livejournal.com]

<3