PARENTING HELL! Entitlement Syndrome
Here I am again writing about our continual struggles with our 14-year-old son’s behavior. He has now elevated to theft, taking my old Galaxy S4 from my desk drawer, claiming he was entitled to it.
I don’t often look in that drawer so I would not have discovered the phone was missing. We found out while attending his annual IEP meeting at school, a number of teachers had noted that he was using his phone in class. Of course, our reaction was “what phone?”, we did not allow him to have a phone, for this exact reason, we knew he would be distracted by it, to the detriment of his academic performance.
Clearly, our son has his own version of the world. He claims we gave him the phone before taking it away from him, hence why he feels he is entitled. The truth is that we loaned him the phone to use with his Cozmo AI-powered robot a couple of Christmas’ back as his tablet would not work with it. And we took it away because he was abusing the privilege, watching YouTube videos until 3 – 4 am on school nights.
We also found out that our son has not been handing in his assignments, despite, in ours, and his teachers opinions, he is more than capable of doing and getting a high grade. Instead of the D’s and F’s he currently has in the three subjects where his teachers had noted the phone use in class.
As our son continues to lie and cheat his way through life, he has lost all videogame privileges. He has eight more weeks to get his grades in order before the summer break. If he cannot show some good faith and improve those grades to a C or higher in all subjects, he will have 3 months of no videogames over summer and also be attending summer school, which will cost $160, but it’s worth the cost in our minds.
The bizarre thing is; when I got my hands on the phone, I couldn’t access its contents. It was boot looping and was not accessible by a computer, my computer acknowledges the phone as connected, but I could not access it, like the phone’s firmware/image had been wiped from its memory. But it had been working according to his teachers, so I don’t know what happened, either way, I have disposed of the phone.
I don’t accept the argument that everyone else in school has a phone, so I am entitled. We made a judgment call, which was correct, given his failing grades and the many reports of the phone being used during class time. The funny thing is that the wife and I were discussing buying a phone, with service, for him next school year as he will be 15 by then and hopefully mature enough to use it responsibly.
He claims to be mature while crying in front of his teachers when he realized that he had been busted for taking the phone. He claims we treat him like a child, our response is, don’t act like a child and we won’t treat you like a child. Someone, who is mature can accept responsibility for their actions, rather than shifting blame to everyone but himself, a mature person realizes they are not entitled to anything.
As I wrote above; we were going to allow him to have a cellphone for the next school year. We were also going to start paying him for chores, if he did it without us asking and be done to our standards, which are not that high really. The caveat being that we would no longer buy him chips or soda’s, if he wants those things, he will have to use the pre-paid debit card that we would have given to him.
Now, moving onto school policies, why the hell do USD259 allow cellphones in class anyway? Why do they not force students to leave their phones in their lockers? Especially today with modern devices and the wealth of things that they can do with them, including the potential to cheat with the Internet at their fingertips. Not to mention phones ringing, notifications sounding, disrupting the whole class.
Bottom line here is the lack of respect on my son’s part, the way he speaks to us is massively disrespectful. His entitlement attitude is hugely disrespectful, we make sacrifices so our kids have what they need. If my wife and I spoke to our parents like our son does to us, there would be hell to pay.
Honestly, I wonder where we went wrong; we never raised him to be this way, we have no clue where this attitude has come from. We have been told that what we are doing is the correct course of action by therapists, teachers, and other parents, but it honestly does not feel like it. But, what’s the other option? allowing him to get away with these actions, especially the theft of the phone, that cannot stand!