RouletteWeekend

When parenting, it is important to find something your kid is interested in and then explore those options or so I read somewhere, especially if your child is like mine and hates all things school. My fifteen year old is on the border of truant and mom is going to jail. He.Just.Hates.School. I’ve mentioned this a time or two or ten. There have been no miraculous changes since the last time. But, one thing he is a huge fan of is money. Making money. Having money. Spending money. He likes money. So in order to get him to go to school every day and to try in some way to get him interested in a little bit of anything, I made him a deal, a.k.a., I bribed him. With money. I offered him a small salary for perfect attendance and 30 minutes of quality reading after he gets home from school. Of course I could be one of those “do it because I said so” parents but that’s not my thing. If it’s your thing and it works, hats off to you. So we made this deal that I thought was pretty sweet. He is going to go to school. He is going to read. I am not going to go to court or jail. All is right with the world.

And then he sweetens his own deal. He comes home from school the other day saying that he needed to go to the store to get some supplies. He’s decided to be the candy man at school. We went and looked around and he changed his mind and decided that he wasn’t going to make a return on his investment with candy because you can get some of it at school for the same price. So he wracked his brain for another moment to decide what his next move would be. Sprite. You can only buy diet sodas in one of the machines at school and I think the other machine either didn’t have sprite or charged more than a dollar for it. I don’t really know. So this kid buys two six packs of sprite at the store. It’s on sale for $3 and he did end up buying some skittles because they were on sale for $.50. He took a couple of each to school the next day and came home with some leftover skittles but no sprite. He packed up to go the next day and he sold out. He packed his bag to go today. I dropped him off at school at 8. By 8:13, he had sent me a text that said, “I’m sold out already.” And he’s making a 50% profit. I don’t know if his sprite and skittles peddling is a capital offense in high school, but if that’s what it takes to get him to go to school and if that’s what it takes to get him to sit down and figure out how much he’s spending, how much he’s making, and how much he needs to sell daily to reach the goal that he’s trying to reach, I’d say that homework project is way more interactive than the ones he dreads doing at school. And at least it’s not drugs, right?

He says there are a couple of other girls who sell chocolates every day so he doesn’t think it’s against the rules. That’s why he went with skittles. He didn’t want to have too much competition in the candy sector. Again, maybe not winning parent of the year from the parenting committee and maybe not even from the teaching committee, but at least he’s going to school and being semi-productive…… for now.