This is the plot of an episode of The Middle.
I tell all my nieces and nephews that if they’re ever doing something that will get them in trouble with their parents but they feel unsafe or need a ride home, that I will drop what I’m doing and be there for them, and will smooth things over with their parents.
I also have a deal with the parents that if I ever need to do that, the kids won’t be punished.
And then he posts the secret code for all the internet to see.
I mean it is wholesome that dad would do that.
But if you find yourself in situations where you might need an escape like this that often that you make this kind of deal, you might reconsider your friend group because that’s an unhealthy relationship.
So I was a kid who was goofy and hung out with gamer kids. One LAN party the kids from the other high school showed up and we went for a drive.
I had no idea it was going to happen, but one kid had a handgun and shot out from the moving car window in a residential neighborhood without any warning.
I probably would have taken my parents up on the offer to bail if I had a code word to do it, but I wasnt about to call my daddy in a car with an unstable kid with a gun to say im scared come get me.
Tldr its a good thing don’t shit on it.
Oh I’m not saying it isn’t.
But one question, would you still hang out with that one guy, and then make a coded text message with your parents to extract you, in case it happened again?
Or would you just cut that one guy it off your life?
So this sounds like a kid who’s in high school, probably 14 or 15. Enough freedom to go off and make mistakes, not old enough to always be able to bail from weird situations (no car or license, just doesn’t have the confidence yet to speak up).
You want your kids to go out and make mistakes, just not ones that have permanent consequences. Having a set up like this is how you let them go get in a little trouble and have a reasonably safe exit plan.
Have you forgotten what it was like to be a child? Granted maybe age has something to do with it?
Finding yourself in situations that change is a part of growing up. I’m a fairly quiet 49 year old dude that grew up in the country but at times I found myself with friends drinking and driving, stealing cars, breaking into houses, but also biking around town, playing handegg or playing D&D or NHL 94.
Point being you couldn’t know where the situation might take you because you’re not as good at sussing out the bad ones and even if your parents knew would you listen to them? Lol
Children literally have not had the experience to recognize these situations, their brains aren’t fully developed, and aren’t fully in charge of their own lives. I agree that if you’re doing this often then you may want to have a conversation about how it keeps happening, but it’s much better for a kid to feel like they have a safety net. Otherwise they may stick in the shady situation and end up in more trouble
I agree with you but the human brain is constantly developing throughout our lives. It’s never fully developed.
Maybe, but it’s definitely true that the frontal lobes are typically significantly underdeveloped in the under-25s, resulting in impulsive behaviour with less caution and poorer long term decision making.
There’s a time in your life when headlessly jumping out of the nest is absolutely the order of the day, and it’s late teens and early twenties.
Having a safety net isn’t a bad thing at this point, at all.
It never stops changing, but there is a significant freeze around 25. From about 12-25 there are massive changes to the brain. It also coincides with them first gaining true freedom, and learning the pros and cons of that.
I dunno, I’m so stupid that I’m pretty sure my brain has stopped developing, and, in certain areas is regressing.
This is the opportunity for them to learn that without getting injured or arrested.
eh, its good to have a plan whether or not certain occurances are common.
I know what to grab (if I can) and where I’m going if my house is on fire because i made a plan. doesn’t mean my house catches fire often, just that I’m realistic about possible dangers and how to respond to them.
Friend had a safe word because she wouldn’t poop at other people’s homes.
Not necessarily. It’s perfectly possible to have a healthy friendship with someone who has some self destructive habits that you aren’t going to hang around for (drugs, alcohol, etc). As an adult, you’d just remove yourself from the situation and not worry about being uncool, but this is a teenager we’re talking about.
Agreed, it’s good to have a plan, but this was very specific and implied this happened more often.
If your house burned down regularly, if suggest looking at the fundamental cause, rather than planning on the next occasion.
There is no implication that this happens often.
But even if your house has never burned down, you should still have a plan for if it does. My wife and I both know what to grab in the case that a fire or carbon monoxide alarm goes off and we need to leave quickly. It’s never happened, but you don’t want to be in the moment running around panicking because you didn’t have a plan.
It doesn’t need to be some crazy detailed thing - something simple like “grab the green folder in the file cabinet” or, like this example, “text me “x” and I’ll get you out” will work fine, and will save you when it’s needed.
That could get awkward if the kid butt-texts an X. Maybe use a more complicated code.
Suggestion for new safeword:
Fluggedaboutit
Was that that volcano that erupted a few years ago?
“erupted”? It spoke the word of its ancestral tongue you godless heathen
I didn’t clean the garage
My son and I have our coded message that we know to share only when we want the other to literally drop everything, track location, and potentially call 911. If said over the phone or via text, it seems like one party is irresponsible, and the other party is irritated.
I doubt we’ll ever have to say it, but to me it’s worth us having set that up.
In high school, a few friends and I had this. I had a really great friend group. Never needed it, fortunately.
Can you give an example?
If one of them says What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo. it means the other is in trouble.
That’s convenient, since you can text it one handed with your eyes closed.
Wholesome? Or just teaching your kid how not to advocate for themselves. It’s okay to bail on a situation you don’t like.
As somebody who suffered a lot with social anxiety when I was younger I would have loved this option. I knew I could leave whenever I could but all the hand shakes and see-you-laters, etc interaction were so difficult for me.
Instead I had a really uncomfortable time “advocating for myself”. Which one one hand, like you say, did teach me a lot. But it wore me down a lot and often I would be the last person to leave just because I didn’t have the energy/mindset at the time. A good mixture of both would have been ideal.
Eh, I understand where you’re coming from, but the reality is that not everyone is going to be willing to tell a group of peers “no.” We want to teach our kids that it’s okay to do so, and we want to instill enough self-confidence in them to do it, but peer pressure is real and it’s powerful, especially to young people.
Offering an alternative way for them to get out of an uncomfortable situation doesn’t seem like a bad idea to me. We can work on building boundary-setting as a skill while also acknowledging that it takes time to build it.
And invest your point as well, but I think this kind of stuff ends up making kids unable to remove themselves from situations they don’t like. Whcih begs the question- what happens when dad isn’t available? That kid won’t know what to do and may find themselves in a situation that they don’t want to be in or worse- dangerous.
This type of thing weakens people.
I’m not suggesting kids have their feet held to the fire, but there’s some thing they need to learn as they grow up, and self-advocacy is an important one. Dad can’t bail you out of all you problems.
there’s a time and a place to develop self-sufficiency, but having a foundation where one was supported in their decisions before that helps tremendously
the time will come, there’s no need to rush it
my dad didn’t bail me out of shit and i ended up not being able to speak up or advocate for myself about anything. since i never had a safe out i ended up desensitized to uncomfortable situations, spending the most formative decade of my life working out the suicidal ideation i had developed after getting bullied into an injury that i lacked the self-advocacy to speak up about. i sure would’ve appreciated a hand.
“weakens people” reads to me like the extremely flawed mouse utopia experiment that i still hear thrown around as a deflection to the reduction of suffering. fuck off with that bullshit.
Exactly.
The first part of learning to remove yourself from bad situations is learning to know when it’s time to bail.
And that’s a lot easier to make the call on when you have an actual way to make the exit.
Even as adults, nobody says “This situation sucks, you are all bad people, I don’t like it and I’m leaving.” No. We say “Aight well I’m working tomorrow so I gotta go” or any other number of convenient excuses we can create for ourselves as autonomous adults.
Tweens and young teens don’t have that autonomy. You’re at the party until it ends or you decide to leave - and deciding to leave looks suspicious as fuck when you already confirmed you were free, and you don’t have any adult responsibilities which could pull you away.
Plus, you probably don’t have your own transport. Leaving may require cooperation from someone who drives, so the very act of leaving is materially so much harder than as an adult, where you can literally just walk out.
So yeah. Having a functional exit is a huge help.
My parents didn’t bail me out of shit, and I have no issues advocating for myself.
Absolutely not true that is some toxic thought to have.
Do kids not ride bikes without their parents? Nobody drives without their parents? Nobody does anything they’re taught without the ones who taught them?
What actually happens is they learn they can just leave, that pressure is invisible and they grow the muscles and knowledge of what it looks like to slip out of a situation. The next time they’re in it, they will have experience on how it felt to leave the first time. It’s reinforcement.
There is nothing wrong with using both, and we have no idea from the post what other life lessons this father is teaching their kids.
Depending on the scenario, such as a situation where herd mentality has already taken over, it might make sense to just quietly dismiss yourself or have some escape plan that does not include trying to confront the herd; that can be dangerous.
Hypothetical: What if they were about to do something legally dubious. That kid may paint a target on themselves if they start acting like a “snitch.”
To your point, I agree we should be teaching folks how to stand up for themselves and how to set boundaries all that, but thats not always the way to do it (and again we have no clue what else this obviously cool / responsible father is doing).
I have this with a friend. But it’s more for things like “I need help disposing of this body ASAP”.
I just realized that I have one friend who I would dispose of a body for.
It can backfire though
this is rather baroque and convoluted.
wouldn’t it be easier to simply teach your kid some prudence and common sense?
Yeah, this requires context. For what reason do you feel unsafe, to the point that you have to lie in front of “friends”? This just reeks of social instability.
Social instability?! In a teenager?!?!? No way.
Yes? You think It’s healthy to systemize lying instead of learning how to act social?
I think it warrants context for it to be understandable behavior.
Teenagers? Reeking?
(We agree I’m just being funny because I’m immature)
Teenagers tend to get into all kinds of situations. It’s best to let them and be there for them when they need you.
I could imagine a girl felling the vibes of a party shift. She could say she wants to bounce but then there will be questions and that may not be the vibes the rest of the party wants to hear. Some guy has cornered her all night. Or some bullies are there and she doesn’t want to be with them but dosen’t whant t to start something.
Yeah, this is about a “son”.
Yeah, boys don’t find themselves in uncomfortable or potentially dangerous situations.
I don’t see any need for additional context, the kid was uncomfortable and his dad was there to get him out, no questions asked, as it should be. They might want to talk about it afterwards, with an eye to understanding the situation better, and working out how to avoid getting into that sort of situation in future, but that’s between the kid and his dad.
