| My oldest daughter is just four years old. Even though
she can’t legally drive where we live for another twelve and a half
years she’s already telling me what color car she wants. I can
feel her pain and anxiety. I used to hate the fact that we have
age limits on things like driving a car, voting for president or
drinking alcohol. Now that I’m an “adult” I see things much
differently. Not only do I agree that there needs to be age
restrictions on driving a car or drinking alcohol but also on a host of
additional actions. As far as voting for president, I’m pretty
sure that’s fixed anyway so why not let anyone who can push a button
cast their vote? Some things however need
boundaries. Therefore my wife and I have set out to assign age
boundaries to many of our kid’s requests. For example, nobody
under the age of twelve is allowed within ten feet of a piano. If
banging on the keys like a chimpanzee were outlawed the world would be
a better place. Not to mention dozens of people could avoid some
pretty nasty headaches right around Christmas time. There’s
nothing cute about being off key. As Johnnie Cochran might have
once said: “If you can’t play, stay away”. It seems every time I turn around I see the kids with pierced ears getting younger and younger. The rule in my house is that when our kids are old enough to accurately pronounce and spell the word “anesthesia” they can get earrings. I don’t see that happening for a couple more years. When my wife and I were dating we
often went camping. Now we own a home of our own and don’t need
to sleep out in the woods with the raccoons, bears, skunks, deer ticks
and other forms of wildlife that seem offended when I enter their
turf. Thus an age boundary was applied to our kid’s request to go
camping. The next time Haley’s Comet comes around we promised to
take the kids out into the woods and spend the night in a tent.
Luckily for us Haley’s comet isn’t due to pass Earth again until
2062. (We may have forgotten to tell our kids that). Every year around this time a group of
us go and see Jimmy Buffett. The concert is not the main
attraction but rather the four hour party out in the parking lot prior
to Jimmy arriving. We know what these things are like so we’ve
already prepared our answer for when some boy wants to take one of our
girls to a concert. When our girls are old enough to become
president of the United States they can go to a concert without
parental supervision. We figure by the time they’re thirty five
they should know the difference between Mr. Right and Mr. Right Now. Some people think that rules like
these aren’t enforceable and that the kids will just do as they
please. Not quite. The trick is to have all these rules
written up and ready for your kids by the time they learn to sign their
name. Then what you do is call a Notary Public and have them sign
their Children’s Bill of Rights in front of a witness. |
