Voices in My Head: Boundaries

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.

Of course you'll need to have stipulations in your Children's Bill of Rights as to what the penalty will be if and when any of the above laws are broken. We like to keep it simple so each law is assigned a monetary fine. If the child can't afford to pay us cash at the time of the offense then the amount of the fee is deducted from what we plan to pay for their first car.