Great Outcome, But Did I Over-Parent?

Perhaps this is a normal part of parenting a teen. But it seems like more and more often, I am finding myself undecided as to whether I am over-parenting. I still question whether or not I should have taken Philip to see his first R-Rated movie at age fourteen. I still question the degree to which I intervened in how Philip carried out his relationship and eventual breakup with Layla. And now, I question how much I intervened helping Philip to nail down his first summer job.

Summer is difficult for fifteen-year-olds. Fifteen-year-olds are too old for traditional summer camp, but not old enough for most jobs. And it is already difficult for teens to nail down gainful summer employment. Back when I was fifteen, I worked for minimum wage as a weekend pool attendant. That was a frustrating summer. I didn’t even work every weekend. The following summer when I was sixteen was even more frustrating because I was unemployed. I was hoping Philip would enjoy something better.

Philip had one huge advantage. He did not need any more income. He already commanded a high hourly wage refereeing. That meant he could work for free as an intern somewhere. Rather than going through the usual channels like the vocations office at Hermes High School, I decided to get creative. I thought about Philip’s actual skills and abilities and how he could actually deliver value in a business context.

I found my creative solution in the heart of leading-edge business creativity: An online advertising agency. The advertising agency was conveniently located a short walk from one of the city bus stops in Santa Carla. I knew the CEO but could not say I was on the best terms with him. This was going to be interesting, and it was going to be fun.

I first pitched the idea to Philip. In exchange for the chance to do interesting and relevant work during the summer, he would be willing to work for free or at most a modest stipend. The idea was simple. He would research, identify and at least partially qualify relevant youth-oriented websites for the agency’s clients to potentially place online advertisements. Philip liked the idea. But the hard part was ahead.

Next I contacted the CEO. Since the CEO was an avid user of online tools, I was able to contact him via instant messenger. “Hi Ken. Do you have a minute? I have a business idea that might have huge appeal.” When he responded favorably, I continued with my pitch. “My son is an honors student at Hermes High School. He earns $15 - $25 per hour refereeing, so he doesn’t need to earn any additional money this summer. He’s willing to work for free or for only a modest stipend in order to gain meaningful experience in a summer internship. We were thinking he could assist your advertising executives by doing research on the internet to identify high-traffic, youth-oriented sites on which to place advertisements for your clients.”

“Hmmm,” Ken typed back to me on the instant messenger. “Let me think about it as well as run the idea by a couple of my account managers. Give me until next Tuesday. Then message me again.” We had passed the first screen. When Tuesday came along, Ken agreed to schedule an interview for Philip. We scheduled it during a business day when Philip was on his Spring break. Philip dressed in the jacket, oxford cloth shirt, dress pants and dress shoes we had bought for him to wear for dances just three and a half months earlier. The pants were already so tight he could barely button them around his waist. I had shown Philip the advertising agency’s website and had explained how to handle an interview.

The agency was doing better than it had been the last time I had visited. They were in a new office that sported bright wall paint in the company’s color on the North and South facing walls. There were high ceilings and fifteen to twenty, seven foot trees in boulder-sized pots. Most of the staff members were in their twenties or early-thirties. The exceptions were Ken and CFO. In short, the place was hip – or whatever word Philip would use to mean hip. A recently hired account executive had been scheduled to practice his corporate presentation to his manager. Ken had Philip sit in on the presentation to determine whether or not Philip could grasp the company’s business model.

Philip passed their final screen and was offered an internship. It was a big score in his mind and in my mind. I expect Philip will have fun and will learn a lot. He’ll also get up to take up to two weeks off, so that his summer won’t be all work. Philip will need to regularly referee on weekends in order to maintain his desired teen lifestyle. But as a package it looks good. Still, I wonder if I over-parented. The internship was my brain-child, not his. I hope I modeled going off the beaten path rather than simply doing it for him. Time will tell. At this point in Philip’s life, when it comes to his success in life I am going to err in the direction of over-parenting.

Shutting Down the Cyber-Bully

For two months now, Philip and Vienna have been flirting but they are not even close to being in an official relationship. A small number of their peers know or suspect that it was Vienna who sent the anonymous rose and card to Philip at school the Friday before Valentine’s Day. Regardless of whether their friendship develops into a romance, Philip highly values Vienna’s friendship, admiration and respect.

On a recent Friday, Philip and Vienna were in PE class playing softball. Philip hit a line drive squarely into Vienna’s ankle. Knowing my son gets particularly upset when he hurts somebody, it is almost certain that Philip apologized far too profusely to the point where Vienna started to get visibly embarrassed and some of their peers in PE probably even started snickering among themselves. Still, it should have been an isolated event of little long term consequence.

But on that Sunday afternoon, Philip took a look at Vienna’s formspring page. Formspring has gotten quite a lot of media attention lately on the topic of cyber-bullying. Some blame posts on formspring as what finally drove a promising teenage girl to commit suicide. Whether or not one believes formspring encourages the practice of cyber-bullying, it is certainly a good venue to practice it. The reason is formspring allows people to anonymously post messages directed to particular individuals. And despite the frequent rude postings, many teens including Vienna love their formspring accounts.

And so on Sunday, Philip saw a conversation that began with an anonymous party apologizing for hitting Vienna in the ankle during PE. Philip found it strange and disconcerting that someone was pretending to be him, especially since Vienna seemed annoyed “We’re good. PLEASE stop apologizing.” But then it got worse.

The pretender continued the dialog and made Philip look like an insensitive idiot by writing “Sure. Sorry.” With each new post from the pretender, he or she was making Philip appear more and more invasive. In turn, Vienna’s responses indicated she was getting progressively agitated and uncomfortable with the exchange. The pretender did an amazing job imitating the way Philip talks, although the pretender completely failed at imitating how Philip writes online. Eventually Vienna told the pretender not to speak to her. But the pretender kept pushing for two more posts that painted Philip as desperate to elicit a friendly response from Vienna without any respect for her wish to be left alone.

Philip was understandably horrified. He wanted to correct things with Vienna, but he also wanted to show respect for her request not to speak with her. He went into school Monday quite upset about the situation and not knowing what to do. But his concerns were soon put to rest.

Early in the day, Nancy approached Philip and asked him if he had seen Vienna’s formspring page. Philip lied and said no. Nancy then went on to explain that someone had been pretending to be Philip on Vienna’s formspring account and had gotten rude. Nancy told Philip that Vienna and her friends knew it was not Philip and that they had a reasonably good idea who was actually harassing Vienna as well as trying to make Philip look like a creep. In short, Vienna and her friends didn’t want Philip to worry about the matter in the slightest. On Monday after school, Philip and Vienna shared a brief online chat using Facebook’s instant messenger. Everything was cool. If anything, the event on formspring had brought the two one step closer. Vienna had clearly forgotten how embarrassed she had felt in PE.

Philip and Vienna’s experience demonstrates that teens are often wiser than we might expect. They are not always fooled or intimidated by cyber-bullies. But it also demonstrates that cyber-bullying is very much alive and well on the internet. For those who are less socially adept and confident, those facing a particularly stressful time in life, as well as those needing medical intervention to treat depression or anxiety, cyber-bullying can be the cause of great hurt, misunderstanding and worry. But for the majority of kids, I believe there is no need to panic. Under normal circumstances, a teen’s reputation is established in day-to-day interaction. That reputation is not likely to be suddenly be torn down by a cyber-bully, not even one crafty enough to imitate the finer details of Philip’s speaking mannerisms.

A Fashion Makeover for a Teenage Guy

Philip has grown at least four inches in a very short period of time. He’s started shaving. And the muscles in his arms are rapidly catching up to his six-pack abdomen. Earlier in the year, Philip looked decidedly grunge with jeans, sneakers, sunglasses, a t-shirt and an unzipped hooded, zip-up sweatshirt falling off one or both of his shoulders. But what was decidedly grunge in September was looking boyish by January and beginning to even look effeminate by late February. At least that was the way I was seeing Philip’s standard attire appear as the body underneath went through such a rapid change in such a short period of time. The jeans, sneakers and even the sunglasses were fine. It was how he was layering his upper body that no longer looked right to me.

But Philip is no longer the child whose parents can dress him as they choose. A father or a mother can only influence such choices at this point. Control over my son’s attire would be absurd. I know it. And Philip knows it. Philip likes his growing independence as he should. And Philip, like most teenagers, is willing to defend his growing independence. In fact, those parents who insist on controlling such trivial aspects of a young adolescent’s life meet stern resistance and sometimes even rebellion. It is the stage in life in which carving out one’s independence is essential to emotional health and personal development. But I was still convinced Philip’s attire was looking more effeminate as the body beneath shed the last of what resembled a middle-school boy. And maybe he was at least wondering if I wasn’t the only person who was rapidly losing admiration for his attire of choice.

I knew I couldn’t make Philip change. But I did succeed in getting him to explore. And as long as I did not require him to change and as long as I gave him a broad range of options, he was willing to entertain my idea of updating his wardrobe. I showed him images online during the week and then took him to the mall on Saturday. The first store we visited was his first choice as opposed to my first choice. But I was just fine with that. The store catered to a variety of youthful grunge-like styles. At first, we simply needed to find his size which turned out to be medium. He brought one style of shirt to the dressing room in medium and small sizes. Once he had decided upon medium, I brought him one shirt after another to try on. All were button-up. He put them on over his dark t-shirt the same way he had put the hooded sweatshirt over his t-shirts. But somehow this looked better. The button-up shirts did not effeminately slide off his shoulder and they hugged his torso more evenly.

Philip rejected most shirts quickly. About half of them he did not even want to try on. But that was consistent with my unwillingness to propose perhaps half the styles in the store. The colors just did not look right, at least on Philip. Eventually Philip settled on a plain white button up and two with reddish cross patterns. After that success at his first choice store, I took Philip to a more upscale store that offered similar styles to the shirts he selected. He tried on about six more shirts at that store and picked two for purchase. One had a grey and black cross pattern. The other was mostly white with an elegant dark blue cross pattern. This last shirt proved his favorite. He picked out one more with a reddish-brown cross pattern, but its price tag was more than the other two shirts combined, so he got his father’s one veto of the day. While waiting to pay, Philip tried out the store’s colognes and particularly liked one of them. We added a bottle of the cologne to our purchases and nearly called it a day.

The last stop was at the health store. There we bought a protein drink to help him build muscle mass. And that was the end of our makeover shopping trip. I would call it a partial success. Philip is drinking his protein drink each day after lacrosse practice. He put on four sprays of the cologne for the final dance of the school year at Hermes High School. He wears the shirt with the dark blue cross pattern two days per week, one of the reddish cross patterns one day a week and the least effeminate of his hooded zip-up sweatshirts the other two days. I’m reasonably satisfied with the improvement. We’ll see how long it takes for him to wear the plain white or the grey and black shirt to school, if ever. And if he doesn’t, how different is Philip from his father, anyway?

Slam Dancing With the Teen Reaper

For high school guys, especially the larger and more physically-oriented ones, high contact sports have huge appeal. They wear helmets and body armor. And they look forward not merely to out-scoring their rivals, but also to delivering some pain and humiliation in the process. Likewise, they are willing to risk some pain and humiliation in the process. The most manly-sounding exploits bragged about during morning and lunch breaks at Hermes High School happen in the high contact sports.

The most followed high-contact sport in high school is Football which is played during the Fall Season. In the Spring Season, the high-contact sport is Lacrosse. All but two of the Lacrosse players at Hermes High School are also Football players. Philip is one of those two exceptions. For a freshman guy, Philip is far above average in height at 5’8” but below average in weight at only 130 pounds. Philip knows Football would not work for him. But Lacrosse leverages his speed, wind and agility. And it doesn’t hurt that Philip has been playing Lacrosse since the fifth grade. Despite his above average height, Philip is one of the shortest players on the Hermes High School Lacrosse team. And he is certainly the lightest player by at least fifteen pounds.

Despite his size, Philip has quickly earned the respect and admiration of his teammates. During scrimmage time at one of early practices, Philip delivered more than one perfect assist to Bruce, the team’s star player and Erica’s ex-boyfriend. After scoring a second perfect goal from an assist by Philip, Bruce nick-named Philip The Boss and the name has stuck.

The game against Cabrillo High School was the first official Friday “under the lights” game of the season. We did not know any of the Cabrillo players or their names, but by the end of the game we knew who Jacques (Cabrillo’s #20) was. Early in the third quarter Philip had the ball at the Cabrillo goalie’s two o’clock about fifteen yards away. Two opposing players were headed in Philip’s direction. The first was Jacques who was coming to check him on the right. In a split second decision, Philip decided to take the check from Jacques rather than dodge it. He planted his left foot and leaned to the right. Their bodies slammed. Jacques helmet was low as they collided. The check was harder than Philip had expected and his left ankle seemed to absorb the energy in a way that strained some of the tissue. Philip then took on the cross-check of another opponent before passing the ball to a teammate who was uncovered due to the double-team on Philip. But then the referee blew his whistle hard to stop the action.

Jacques had fallen to the ground after checking Philip and was laying there not moving. As things went quiet, it sounded to Philip like Jacques was struggling to breathe. The referee ordered all players to take a knee and Jacques coach walked onto the field. Philip was kneeling closest to Jacques. From the bleachers I could hear the Hermes players saying “Philip” over and over in their conversation and I realized the Cabrillo player had gone down after colliding with Philip. At that moment I did not know if the rival player was paralyzed, dying or merely had the wind knocked out of him. But as Jacques continued to lie there not moving I began to fear the worst. Were we witnessing this year’s high school sports tragedy? Would my son have the paralysis or even death of another player weighing on his conscience for the rest of his life? Even if there had been not a foul that was a lot for me to carry, let alone a fifteen-year-old boy.

But soon the words reaching me sounded hopeful. People were saying Jacques was having a seizure, and that Jacques had to take medicine to manage his epilepsy. Nonetheless, an ambulance arrived and Jacques was carried off the field on a stretcher. The referees canceled the rest of the Junior Varsity game out of respect for Jacques and to ensure the Varsity game could be played and end at an appropriate time. Philip was visibly shaken by the experience and his left ankle was sore from Jacques’ extra-hard check, so I took him home. We qualified Jacques’ full name so we could call the local hospital and find out if Jacques was recovering well or not.

We were all fortunate that evening. Jacques was released from the hospital three hours later and went home. But it was a sobering reminder that high contact sports must be played with skill and with caution.

The Popular Girl, the Nice Girl and Other High School Archetypes

This is an oversimplification, of course. But plenty of truth can be found in oversimplifications. Vienna, the rather nice girl, is surrounded by friends. Erica, the extremely popular girl, is surrounded by worshippers. Philip has a name for the guys who worship but do not date Erica. He calls them her guy-bitches. In contrast, he calls the guys who are friends but not boyfriends with other girls like Vienna metro-friends.

To be clear, the average guy at Hermes High School—in fact the average freshman guy at Hermes High School—is neither a guy-bitch, nor a metro-friend. Most guys merely fall into or not far from one of the traditional categories of scholar, jock, nerd, delinquent, or loser that have existed at least since I was in high school, though under varying names. Philip is a scholar (that is, having the good qualities of both the jocks and the nerds) and I am trying with only limited success to introduce Philip to the idea of also being a metro-friend. Among the freshmen at Hermes High School, only a small handful of guys succeed at being metro-friends.

The guy-bitches deserve a closer look. For some, it is merely the hopeless ambition to win Erica’s love. Self-deception plays a role in these cases. For others, it is an acceptance of the fact that Erica’s love—though still desirable—is beyond one’s reach, so the next best thing is to be in Erica’s entourage, especially since Erica is also surrounded by a bunch of girls who also worship her with an enthusiasm that rivals that of the guy-bitches. And then there are the chief-guy-bitches. The chief-guy-bitches are a handful of jocks—each of whom is popular in his own right—who nonetheless chooses to play into Erica’s guy-bitch game in support of high school’s popularity hierarchy. The chief-guy-bitches also enjoy the benefit of not being fully under Erica’s control. One of the chief-guy-bitches is Walter, who Philip privately refers to as The Chump. Walter defied Erica by calling her parents when Erica got herself drunk at a Halloween party. More recently, Walter waved Erica over to join a group of freshmen celebrating Philip’s athletic prowess in the previous day’s lacrosse game even though he knew Erica was not speaking to Philip.

Not all girls have metro-friends, but Vienna is certainly one of them. Vienna brought her best friend Kayla and two metro-friends Rob and Noah along with her to Philip’s party in late February. It was what saved Philip’s party from being a complete disaster. In early March, Kayla and Noah announced to the world via their Facebook “relationship status” that they were boyfriend and girlfriend. One has to respect Noah for spending a long time getting to know Kayla and genuinely befriending her ahead of asking her out. Most freshmen at Hermes High School rush into boyfriend-girlfriend relationships that end up lasting only ten days.

With all the time she spends hanging out and chatting it up with Noah and her metro-friends, one would think Vienna would have no trouble talking to Philip. But this has not been the case. Since his party, Philip has been making a sincere effort to get to know Vienna better, but he has been disappointed by how little she communicates.

“Do you ask her open-ended questions?” I asked Philip when he told me his attempts to engage Vienna in conversation kept falling flat.

“Of course I ask her open-ended questions, dad!”

“Alright. Maybe she is having trouble talking to you because she is shy or nervous.”

“It doesn’t matter, dad! She could be non-communicative because she is shy, nervous, lost interest in me, or was never interested in me in the first place. No matter what the reason, there is no way I can have an actual relationship with her if we cannot actually talk!”

Philip’s astute observation impressed me. And he succeeded in his goal to get me to stop asking him about Vienna. Still, as a parent I like Vienna a whole lot more than I like Erica. Both Erica and Vienna are fourteen-year-old girls who are still growing up. Each is a tangled and imbalanced mixture of maturity and immaturity, wisdom and foolishness, bravery and insecurity. Each wants to be admired by guys, especially the more mature-looking jocks and scholars. And each finds the prospect of a real relationship with a guy both desirable and terrifying.

It is unclear whether either Erica or Vienna is truly ready for a real relationship with a guy. I also wonder whether Philip is truly ready for a real relationship with a girl. But I do think there is a core difference in attitude between Erica and Vienna. Erica wants to get. And Vienna wants to share. And while that core difference in attitude holds, I hope Philip will never fall for Erica or someone like her again. But girls like Vienna deserve a genuine shot at the dear scholar who is my son Philip.

Talk it up or Watch it Fail

Bradley was on the far end of the periphery of Philip’s social network. He was a reasonably popular junior and had been the second string quarterback at Conquistador High School, one of Hermes’ main rivals. For his seventeenth birthday, Bradley’s family gave him what was intended to be a very generous gift. They rented a nice facility, hired a DJ and sponsored a teen dance on Valentine’s Day evening. It was on a Sunday night, but all the schools in the area were closed Monday for President’s Day.

Bradley put up a nice invitation on Facebook. He invited all his friends and encouraged them to invite others. The event clearly stated that one did not need a formal invitation to attend. The attendee list included students from Hermes, Conquistador and Santa Carla. Since Bradley was a junior from another school and Philip was only a freshman, they were not friends on Facebook. Nonetheless, Philip recognized several friends on the attendee list, including a few of the girls who had gone snowboarding with him two weeks earlier. Philip was nervous about going. But between the event’s natural appeal and Amelia and I encouraging him, Philip decided he would go.

On the Facebook event page, over fifty people had accepted Bradley’s invitation and over seventy had said maybe. More than half were girls. I dropped Philip off a fashionable half an hour after the start time to what seemed like an overflow crowd. But my initial perception proved wrong. The teens were hanging around outside because the party inside was nearly dead. Philip estimated there were fifteen girls and thirty-five guys at the peak of the party with perhaps a total of seventy-five if one were to count those who made a brief appearance and then left. Philip managed to enjoy just two dances with the two girls he knew from snowboarding. Then after less than an hour the dancing had stopped because the girls were too embarrassed to dance on a near-empty dance floor. In short, the dance was a miserable failure and Bradley must have been crushed.

Per his request via a text message, I picked up Philip an hour before the dance officially ended. We talked about the dance and why it might have been such a failure. It wasn’t Bradley’s popularity. And it was not the appeal of the event itself. One could not fault Bradley and his family for not offering alcohol to minors, but that would have clearly solved the attendance problem. And so in the end it came down to promotion. Bradley simply did not invite enough guests and most importantly he did not talk up the party enough—if at all. Philip’s own reluctance to attend the party was anecdotal evidence enough of this problem.

Understanding Bradley’s mistake in getting people to attend was important. At least it was important in my mind. Philip’s own birthday event, a party that had no DJ and no special facility was scheduled for the following week. The appeal was only a backyard campfire and the chance to hang out with one another. Philip added a mere five people to his Facebook guest list and telephoned just two girls he knew who did not have Facebook accounts. Beyond that, Philip was not comfortable promoting his party.

Philip’s best friend from Oak Hills Charter School, Joshua, arrived right at the beginning of the party. But Joshua’s sister Debbie was grounded and did not join them. Philip and Joshua hung out by the campfire with a CD playing a mix of alternative and hip-hop. Forty-five minutes into the party, the moment of fashionable lateness, Vienna arrived with her best friend and two guys Philip considered friends. Nonetheless, that party was still three to five people short of critical mass. The group of six hung out by the campfire enjoying one another’s company, but the group conversation started to die after about half an hour. Philip suggested they go inside and watch an instant movie. That bought them the length of the movie. But after that Philip was out of ideas and suggested they call it a night just an hour before the scheduled end to the party.

Half the people who had said they were coming to Philip’s party did not come because they decided to go to a basketball game. And none of the people who had said maybe came. Had it not been for Vienna, the party would almost certainly have been only Philip and Joshua. As the evening progressed, I understood why so many parents turn a blind eye toward alcohol at teen parties. But that is not an option we are going to seriously consider. What it means is that until Philip is comfortable actively promoting his parties, there is no point in having another. The days of Amelia or I contacting the parents of Philip’s peers to ensure they attend his parties are behind us. It is up to Philip to make his own social life happen. We’ll have to see how that plays out. At least Philip did not suffer Bradley’s humiliation.

A Daddy Daughter Shopping Trip

Philip was spending the weekend snowboarding with friends. Amelia was on her annual girls’ weekend away. Both were tucked away in a mountain community at least four hours from home. Amelia was with about five friends in a townhouse. Philip was with about thirty-five friends in a lodge. Chloe and I had an entire weekend to do “daddy and daughter” things all by ourselves. We ate the food the other two never wanted to eat. We watched a movie that appealed to us alone. I took her to her basketball game and watched her score three points between a foul shot and a regular basket. But my favorite shared activity of the weekend was shopping together in a girls’ beauty shop that just opened in town.

The store was stationed right next to one of the two pharmacies in Hermes. While Chloe grabbed a shiny metallic basket to shop in earnest, I engaged the store manager on her company’s business plan. The beauty store was actually owned by the pharmacy’s parent company. The idea was to expand the pharmacy’s sale of beauty products by winning business away from the department stores in the mall. The inventory was more high-end than what was normally found in a pharmacy. Additionally, the beauty store had dedicated staff. That day the store manager had one sales assistant. Unlike their department store counterparts, they were not wearing lab coats. Instead they were dressed and made up as if they knew what they were doing by experience, not just training.

While I was asking the store manager about daily sales volume during their first quarter of business, Chloe came by to show me her likely purchase which was a $16.99 twist out container of lipstick. But Chloe called it lip gloss. “You can get the lip gloss if you want, Chloe. But that will probably be all you can get, since you just have twenty dollars.”

Chloe skipped away happy she could get the lipstick. “I’m pretty sure this is what I want to get,” she said with giddy eagerness. “But I want to keep looking around.” Chloe scoured the store. She spent a long time looking at the nail polish. But she also looked at eye shadow, the rest of the lipstick offerings, foundations, powders, moisturizers and everything else that lined the store’s shelves. While the store manager was describing to me the growing interest the store had from middle school aged girls, Chloe came over to ask, “What is mascara?”

After about twenty minutes in the store with no other customers. I figured I owed the store manager an opportunity to sell me something. “I’d like to get some perfume for my wife as a Valentine’s Day gift,” I said. “Can you recommend a few choices?” The store manager brought me over and gave me her sales presentation. From my MBA perspective, there was not much depth to the sales presentation. She simply began straying pinky-length strips of hard paper sticks from the test bottles and asked me my opinion. After the first three, I suggested I narrow my choices down to no more than two and test them out of each of Chloe’s wrists.

After smelling about eleven different perfumes, Chloe came by again having completed her self-guided tour of the store’s entire inventory. She still wanted to purchase the $16.99 lipstick and I told her she could buy it when we leave. Then I recruited her to be the true tester for the perfumes I was considering for Amelia. Chloe was immediately excited by the idea. She had looked at the perfume containers, but hadn’t smelled them at all. Suddenly there were eleven little scent sticks for her to inspect with her own olfactory senses. Trying on multiple perfumes also gave me the perfect platform to ensure Chloe took the scheduled shower I promised Amelia I would enforce.

With Chloe and I as the only customers in the store, the sales manager and her assistant indulged Chloe with their attention. They suggested five sprays rather than two: One at each elbow, one at the base of each hand, and one on the back of the neck. The first three were my top choices from the eleven original sprays. Then based on my feedback, they suggested two more. The final spray to the back of Chloe’s neck carried the day.

We all went to the check-out counter satisfied. Chloe purchased the most expensive container of makeup she’d ever owned. I had formulated an MBA case study if I ever needed one. Amelia had one of the nicest Valentine’s gifts I had ever given her on its way. And the staff at the beauty store had a nice sale of around six percent of their daily quota added to that day’s volume. The purchase came with a few free promotional giveaways for Chloe which topped it all off.

We put our bags in the car and indulged in one last daddy-daughter ritual. We walked into our favorite local coffee shop. I ordered black coffee. Chloe ordered a buttered croissant and a hot chocolate. We sat together for fifteen minutes reviewing our shopping trip to the beauty store. It was a fun trip and a fun weekend for both of us.