The other night I was watching a TV show in which the opening scene consisted of a teenage boy tormenting his father by crawling out of a second floor window in order to maintain the fiction that the lock was broken on their bathroom door—again. The scene went on to show the boy calmly sitting at the breakfast table while the father comically—and ineffectually—blustered and screamed in the same manner employed by all sitcom fathers since Jackie Gleason.
The point of the whole scene, it seemed, was this: don’t annoy your children.
Sounds almost counterintuitive, doesn’t it? I mean, I always thought that the whole raison d’etre for being a parent in the first place was to annoy our children: think how annoying we must have been when they were toddlers, always after them to stay out of the street, to stop sticking screwdrivers into power outlets, and to chew up their food before they swallowed it.
Ditto about when they were in grade school and we annoyed them by insisting that they put their clothes not next to the hamper, not on top of the hamper, and not even (curiously) underneath the hamper, but rather inside of it. Or when we made them bring a coat to school when it was twenty below (even though absolutely none of their friends had to wear coats, and besides, according to the calendar it was Spring already).
But now that at least one of my kids is in high school the rules have changed somewhat, and the stakes have been raised much, much higher. Case in point: the above bathroom story. True, that was fiction (supposedly), but I’ve heard (and participated in) other stories far worse than that. Take the example of this one boy I heard about recently (who shall, for obvious reasons, remain nameless). It seems that each night, as this boy set the dinner table, he would carefully and methodically rub his stepfather’s fork on the dog’s butt. (And not the furry part.) Or another kid I used to know who would regularly siphon the gas out of his father’s car and put it in his own car instead. (The poor guy must’ve taken his car in to the mechanic a dozen times that year, making me wonder if maybe the mechanic wasn’t in on it, too).
The point is that teenagers, while they still might not yet be quite as clever as we are, clearly have the advantage over us when it comes to both deviousness and time. (This could be because they spend every day figuring out how to either get away with or avoid doing stuff.) They really are kind of in the same position as the wait staff is in a restaurant: while in theory your waiter or waitress is on the lowest rung on the restaurant ladder (even a busboy or dishwasher can, with enough benign neglect, make their lives miserable) and the customer is at the top (after all, they’re the ones who pay the bills, right?), in reality, however, everyone knows (or should know) that this is not the case. The truth is, there is a lot of stuff that can happen to your food on its way from the kitchen to the table. A LOT.
And there’s a lot of stuff that a teenager can mess with in the comfort of your (their) own home.
I’m not saying we should live in fear of the teenagers in our homes: like I said, as devious as they are, they still aren’t quite up to speed when it comes to really, really making someone’s life miserable—you need to need married for a few years to get that down. I’m just saying that, maybe, as they get older, we should apply a little caution.
Or, at the very least, start carrying our own silverware around.