Never Ever Land

“MOMMY!! Can I have twenty bucks?! ,” said Kelly.

Kelly, my best friend, has always been a “Mommy’s girl”. She gets what she wants when she wants, but, when it was time for her to go to college, it was time for her to grow up. There was no more asking mommy for gas money, for mommy to do her laundry, or mommy to wake her up on time for class. It was time for Kelly to become independent.

Today, kids are very dependent on their parent or guardians. Most of the time, you can blame it on the parents for having too strong of a hold on their children or spoiling them, then they wonder why their children are thirty years old and are still living in their house. Letting kids at a younger age, preferably before they leave for college for example, be more independent and make their own decisions will benefit them later in life.

Teaching your children good behavior and habits will get them far in life, but keeping a tight leash on them and not giving them the chance to learn who they are and what they have to do in life will get them on the road to nowhere. Responsibility is a key factor in growing up, and you can show your children good responsibility before they really need to have it, by having them keep a clean room or giving them a car to take care of.

It was just like a Lifetime movie I’ve once watched, The Party Never Stops: Diary of a Binge Drinker. The girl in the movie, played by Sara Paxton in the movie, never touched alcohol or drugs, was a star athlete and was a Honor Roll student. When she got to college, have to lessons learned in tolerance or what’s good from bad, she drank too much and had to learn the dangers of binge drinking. She learned her lesson later in life, after being hospitalized. She wasn’t used to being dependent and away from her mother, and her mother’s choices therefore forcing her to grow up.

I believe that growing up kids need to learn to do things on their own, learn to be independent, learn from their own mistakes or they will never grow up. This isn’t Never Ever Land, and at some point you need to mature and do what you need to do to get through life. Everyone matures at different times, and for my best friend Kelly, it was last September when she went to go away to college. Personally, I grew up a couple of years ago, and learned from my own mistakes so, this September when I go away to Long Island University, I’m not scared to be on my own, I know I can do it.