WHOSE RADIO IS IT ANYWAY?
By Yoka Reeder

What do you do when your child wrecks that expensive toy truck you bought him for Christmas? Do you yell at him? When you give your child a present, do you admonish him to take good care of it?

Consider this: when you give your child a gift, it is no longer yours. This seems obvious on its face, but imagine that someone gave you a beautiful necklace and then told you when you could wear it! You'd probably say, "Wait a minute. Is this my necklace, or what?" You would certainly resent anyone who gave you a present and then tried to control how you use it.

You can confuse a child by giving him something and then looking at it as if it were still yours. We parents have this habit and we find it difficult to break away from. But when you give your child a radio and then tell him he can only play it between 4:00 and 6:00, only in his room, not too loud, never when grandma is there, and never that kind of music, don't be surprised that he wrecks that radio.

My mother had a bad habit of giving me camel coats from this particular store in Amsterdam which I knew was an expensive store. And when I was ten I promptly made it into a goal post. I thought that was a perfectly appropriate use of the coat: you make it a goal post and you play in the park. Well, my mother came all apart. And I was in trouble because of that darn coat every day, until I figured it out and lost the coat. My mother thought she was punishing me by letting me wear my older sister's jacket, a real hand-me-down. But I was happy as a lark because that jacket was mine and my mother didn't care about it.

Your kid won't tell you to please take your gift radio back. He really wants the radio and he thinks maybe he can get away with using it the way he wants to and contrary to your instructions, or he may decide to fight shy. Your child may figure out that if he had ear-phones he could turn the volume way up, blast his eardrums off, and play it the way he really wants to when he wants to. And then he figures out where to hide the CDs you told him never to bring into the house. And this is how you turn him into a subversive. And then you wonder why he doesn't trust you.

If you give your child a gift but don't allow him to have full ownership of that gift, the only way the child may be able to survive you is to somehow get around you. You never mean to be viewed by him as the enemy, but can you see that you might be viewed that way?