Big Money, Big Trouble

Since I decided to homeschool my son, I have often been asked: What about socialization? The assumption is that homeschooled children won’t be able to make friends.

It turns out that homeschooled kids can make friends and stir up trouble as well as their schooled counterparts.

Maybe we’ve been listening to too much ABBA, but my son and his partner in crime were on a mission to make money this weekend. This isn’t unusual. An interest in money is one of the developmental milestones for 8-9-year-olds listed in Jerry L. Wyckoff and Barbara Unell’s How To Discipline Your Six to Twelve Year Old … Without Losing Your Mind.

They tried digging through their possessions to pull out items for a garage sale, but couldn’t convince the parents to open up the homes.

They came up with a more lucrative get-rich scheme. They dug up some dirt, put it into Ziploc bags, called it clay, and sold it to the neighbors at $1.00 per bag. The take: $2.00.

The boys were on a roll, and their crime spree was only just starting.

I think that if the boy’s adventures had ended on that high note of earning $2.00 from the re-purposed dirt, everything would have been fine. Instead, it was a long, holiday weekend so we agreed to the sleepover. Big, big mistake!

Somehow, I really thought that these little boys would sleep. I hadn’t taken into account that at the ripe old age of eight, these young men are tweens. Not just tweens, but teens-in-the-making with a powerful determination to compete in the “I-don’t-need-to-sleep” Olympics.

At midnight, I resorted to hanging out in their room until I thought they were asleep. They may have sleeping, or just really great actors.

At 3AM, I woke up and found them playing games on the computer. Unsupervised Internet Explorer time, but I was too groggy to consider the possible ramifications. I just growled and sent them back to bed.

They must have slept, at least a little, because my 11-year-old daughter found an opportunity to give her brother a makeover – a little lipstick, rouge, face powder – sheer humiliation.

In the morning, I was in a rush to take my daughter to a brunch, so I didn’t hear about this grievous crime. Of course, my son was upset that his sister escaped unscathed after this dastardly crime.

He plotted with his partner in crime. How to make her pay?

They formed the Spy-On-My-Big-Sister Club and created a magnificent flag depicting a $100 bill. Then, while Mom and Sis were still out, and they were under the care of the ever vigilant Dad, they engaged in black ops maneuvers.

The spies snuck into Big Sister’s room, dumped everything in sight, and emptied out the Fishy Piggy Bank. They also installed a hypnosis devise that would lull Big Sister into believing that she was at fault. Apparently, my son has been reading too much Calvin and Hobbes.

What a haul! Big Sister had over one hundred dollars in the bank. They could get anything they ever wanted. Yeah, but the good life didn’t last long.

Mom came home and found the mess. A broken chair, stuff all over both kid’s rooms… It was time to clean up, and it wasn’t long before evidence of their short life of crime came to light.

Big Sister’s piercing screams alerted the family to the fishy bank theft. A Google History click told us what they had been looking for on the Internet, and it wasn’t the dunce definition of boob.

Of course, career criminals know that rule number one is: admit no crime. We had to shake them down, using bad cop/good cop, police interrogation techniques to get confessions, and we still don’t know if we got the full story.

It was also hard to be angry. The kids are kind of cute. There was extreme provocation with the makeup assault. And kids are curious.

The boys googled in much the same way that at a similar age we searched our Dad’s closet for the Playboy stash. Of course, the consequences can be a lot scarier on the web. So, we told them that there are creepy people online and that these type of searches can lead you to them. I had my son, again, go over and sign Kim Komando’s 10 Commandments for Kid’s Online. It also doesn’t hurt that now they know that Big Brother/Mother is watching.

My son had to repay his sister. She claimed that she had $200. We don’t know if that is true, and he claims that there wasn’t that much money, but he learned the valuable lesson that in a crime the victim is given greater credence than the perpetrator. He ended up having to give her everything he had, including gift cards that he was saving from his birthday. He also had to clean up the mess. Actually, he volunteered to make things up to his sister. We didn’t tell him to give her everything he had, but I think he really felt awful about what he had done.

Maybe someday he will realize that my secret weapon in keeping him from a life of crime is his own conscience.