You Don’T Trust Me
Posted: June 23, 2008If there is magic bullet that children especially teenagers, use on their folks, a perfect phrase that melts the toughest reslove of a parent within seconds, it is these four words, You don’t Trust Me.
The instant a young person accuses us of being suspicious, of imaging the worst about him, we start back-pedaling.
“No dear, it’s not that I don’trust you being out with your friends or taking the car, it’s just that I….”, and then we run out of words; totally flustered.
Maybe it’s about time we got honest as parents, and recognise that trust is divisible. In other words, we can trust our children in some things, but not others. It’s not an all or nothing proposition.
We do this in the adult world with business all the time. Most of us are authorised, for example, to spend a certain amount of the company’s money in certain accounts, but not the whole corporate cheque book.
So let’s stop being taken in by our kids, and boldly state that trust comes in stages- someof it now, and more later on.
Parents have the task of risking only what we can reasonably expect to be handled safety. To do more is not really trust; it is foolhardly.
