There’s alot of wisdom there Tax-Chick.
And while my oldest two have done me proud, I am seeing what you describe in my younger ones.
My 12 yr. old is relentless in his demands for everything he sees among his peers.
Yesterday he was nagging for a phone again and I wasn’t in the mood....not only isn’t HE getting a phone...mom and dad may have to get rid of THEIR phones and ditch the plan altogether!
Maybe as I got older and overwhelmed with the business and chaos of a large family, I didn’t have as much fight in me as I did with the older ones.
So as you’ve pointed out - maybe it’s just time to rethink how we’ve been looking at things.
My oldest has done really well, too, but the gene for Get Real seems to have skipped the rest of them. Anoreth always wanted to be in the military, never imagined (as my oldest son does) that a living could be made as a guitarist who won’t ever play any music anyone else likes.
I was at the park with some of my friends yesterday, including one who has 13 children. The park was in her neighborhood, and some of her teenagers showed up asking for money to go to McDonald’s “because there’s nothing to eat at home.” She gave them a whole list of things they could have, starting with the previous night’s leftovers, and then the 17-year-old (the original from which my Tom was cloned) said, “I mean there’s nothing to eat that we WANT!” “I saw this movie!” I said. We’re always thrilled to find that everyone else’s children are as impossible as ours ;-).
Of course, if a family that big has leftovers from supper, it probably wasn’t a very popular meal, but still, you don’t have to be very hungry to decide beef stew with rice, or whatever it was, is a lot better than continuing to be hungry.