It’s interesting, but this situation is indicative of some of the struggling that I’ve done as a parent over the years.
While we don’t go upstate for the summer and therefore have never been to the WalMart in question, I find a lot of the sentiments expressed here hitting home.
My kids are all teenagers now. As teens, they are struggling to find and assert their own identities. As a parent, I often find myself asking myself how much to “crack down” on them and how much to simply allow them to be kids. Of course, there are lines not to be crossed, but OTOH, you can’t pounce on a kid for every infraction either. It’s finding that balancing point that has been, I believe, one of the major challenges of being a parent.
A lot of that, I find, is being expressed here in this thread. Of course, it’s for each parent to decide for their kids where the “do not cross” line is. For some, it’ll be physical activity with the other gender. For others, it might be conversations. Others, obviously, take *any* interaction as a line not to be crossed. I’m not going to judge any individual parent’s choices in this matter — they know their kids better than I do. But if you’re going to have “do not cross” lines (wherever they may be), then you have to relax a bit on the other side of that line. If you push the line too far to one side (where nothing is forbidden) you wind up with kids with no rules. If you push the line too far the other way (where your kids have to be perfect, or else) is just as bad.
But if your line is somewhere in the middle (as it is for most of us parents), then that means that (by definition) you have to allow the kids some leeway on those infractions that are not over that line.
The Wolf