We never had voices on any matter- Oh how parenting has changed

After months of searching, I finally found a phone cover for our youngest. The only problem (hers, not mine) was that she didn’t like the way it looked. To my eyes, there was nothing wrong with it, plus it was perfect for the job. And so I insisted she take it or else…

This is where I was coming from – the girl greatly enjoys photography and takes some pretty amazing pictures of sunsets, skylines and other natural features.

She also loves to photograph her favourite subject – herself. Whenever we go anywhere, she begs her siblings to take photos of her as she poses in ways that make it seem like she wasn’t posing at all.

So for her last birthday we decided to invest in a phone with a good camera to help her practise her photography because who knows where that might lead? But there were no covers available at the time hence the search because we wanted to make sure the phone was protected.

Alas, before we could find one, the young lady dropped the phone and what we had feared happened – the screen cracked and the gadget died, less than a month after it was bought!

It took a lot of restraint on my part not to belabour the point that it had taken months to plan and budget for the phone, which had now been rendered useless in a matter of seconds. I figured that the fact that she was now phone-less was punishment enough for her carelessness. And because there was no budget for repairing a broken screen, she would just have to wait.

We were able to repair the phone several months later and when I handed it to her, I stated to her that she had no choice but to accept the first available cover we could find, regardless of whether it was yellow with green dots and purple stripes because I was NOT going to repair her phone a second time.

We finally found one that was very decent (according to me) and I paid the cashier and asked the shop attendant to fit it on the phone while our youngest was still making faces at it. I reminded her that she had no voice in this matter and we left the shop.

Negotiations

Thinking over the incident later, I wondered when we had become so accommodating of the young ones’ preferences. The hubby and I grew up in a time when there was little variety and whatever parents said was law.

If they bought something, children learned to like it because they had no choice. Take, for instance, school shoes. Everyone went to the same shoe shop and bought the same shoes. Nothing wrong with that except that the shoes were not very attractive.

Granted, they were very durable (they were built like tractors), which was why our parents chose them in the first place, but they still looked like blocks of leather.

Of indestructible shoes

These shoes were more of a problem for girls than boys because girls like to have a variety of pretty things. If you had feet that grew slowly, then you were stuck with the same shoes for several terms since the only reason you got new ones was because you had outgrown the current ones.

Eventually, desperate for a new pair of shoes (the design would be modified every so often), some people would try to damage them – in vain. These shoes were so tough that no amount of dragging them through mud or rain puddles could do them any harm.

Eventually, they would be thrown away and the story at home would be that they got lost or stolen. Then you crossed your fingers that the result would be a new pair of shoes – it wasn’t automatic.

For those of us who were born after several siblings, new stuff was rare. As long as my older sisters had outgrown anything and it was still in (relatively) usable condition, it became mine. And if I wanted a new one for reasons besides growing out of it, I had to have a very convincing story.

Times have surely changed going by how much our youngest manages to get away with. It doesn’t help that the hubby dotes on her, and she knows it! No wonder she prefers to shop for school shoes with him – she only needs to make a face at any shoes he picks and before he knows it, he’s been dragged into another shop where the shoes are invariably pricier. But there are things she won’t get past me, like refusing to use the new phone cover.