Quote:
Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA
Oh the, ahem, "joys" of parenting.
Currently my grounded-until-I-say-otherwise child is discovering that other children in the neighborhood do NOT have the ability to grant permission to "borrow" the tennis court of a vacant house on the neighborhood.
It was only a few weeks ago that my then-10 y/o knew that without even being told. A very proud parenting moment indeed, seeing good judgement even in the face of peer pressure.
In April he turned 11 and apparently it made him stupid.
The real estate agent handling the property confirmed what we knew already: nobody had permission to be roaming around over there, especially not with the house vacant as the owners have returned to Florida to be with family as the wife nears death with terminal lung cancer. The agent will be padlocking the courts later tonight and explaining the no trespassing thing to the parents of the other kids.
The kicker? Who is the real estate agent married to? Only the primary external fundraiser for the school all of the boys involved attend. Way to make an impression guys, good job.
Another lesson learned tonight that will probably come in handy is that, when you already know you're in deep shit, slamming the door after you're exiled to your bedroom is NOT going to help matters one bit.
Oh the joys of parenting  |
I feel for you man, we went through just about the same thing about a couple months ago. Our oldest son turned 12 at about that time and until then, everything was going on fine at school. Sure a bit of nagging was needed to make sure homeworks studying were being done properly, but results were good. It all came down crashing within a week or so.
Andrew is part of a special program in 6th grade. It's called the Arts-Language-Sports Program (ALSP). Every morning and the afternoon on Wednesday it's regular school, in a sort of expedited way. Their days are a bit longer than regular schooldays, but they need to see the same stuff a regular class would, but in about 75% of the time. The other four afternoons, they go out to either practice a sport, perfect an art, or study a language. You sign up for one at the start of the school year. Some play hockey, some soccer, some study English (remember that we're in Quebec, it's a French school, they're learning a second language), which is Andrew's case. He loves it. He probably could have picked karate (he's about to test for his black belt) or football, that is if we'd had let him. He liked English and we strongly believe that it's necessary for him to be able to speak/write in both French and English.
Anyway, as I said, he'd had good grades in his first year last year. Homweorks are a bit more important, but he was doing well. We offered him a used computer for his own room last X-Mas, allowing him a reasonable amount of time with it during the week. Then one week we got a report from his English teacher, written on one of his exams. "Andrew, if you'd paid more attention instead of talking with the other kid, you would have had a better score" and such. Report card came the following week. He used to score in the high 80's in English, he dropped it to 68 for that semester. We were floored. We took away computer privileges during the week, except for specific work. Away went the PS2 during the week too. He's still on a weekend only basis for those two.
Luckily for him, he didn't slam any door. Not too sure what I would have done. Since then, we've been emailing his teacher regularly, monitoring his level of effort in class.
He's not done anything stupid out of class, but I always have the feeling we're so close to one try of pushing the boundaries one 16th of an inch to far. I guess all kids are like that, we probably were.
FM