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Guiding your high school senior during COVID Hi Taylor: My son graduates from high school in a few months and I’m trying to figure out the right Taylor advice to give. Kovar Going out on your own is never easy, and it’s especially hard these days! Any words of wisdom? - Liz Hey Liz: It’s been an unbelievably trying time for young adults. Fortunately, a lot of the advice I would have offered a year ago still holds true when it comes to college students and finances. Don’t take out big loans without a plan. The student loan crisis rages on, working its way toward $2 trillion in national debt. The problem isn’t just that young people are taking out loans; the issue is that they don’t have any strategy for repayment. We can’t really place the blame on 18-year olds trying to get a degree, so it’s our job to help them look ahead and set goals. Explain how the interest works, how long it will take to pay back a certain amount of debt, and how those monthly payments can make it really hard to focus on anything else until the balance is paid down. Also, everyone should think long and hard about taking on student debt for remote classes. Nothing wrong with postponing school for a year and saving some cash while we wait for life to get back to normal. Sniff out free money. It’s always worth looking for grants and scholarships, and not just the traditional ones that pay for fouryear schools. If your son can get the tuition covered for a certificate or associate’s degree, he might get a jump start on his career and still be able to attend a university part-time. A little outside-the-box thinking goes a long
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way when it comes to saving money and preparing oneself to transition into the professional world. Take it from a guy who got most of his education through free audiobooks from the library! Start saving. Just throwing a few dollars in the bank every week will have your son outpacing the rest of his generation when it comes to saving for the future. Student loans and changing industries have most people waiting until their 30s (at the earliest) to start saving, so this is the easiest and best thing a young person can do. If he wants to be more active, he can buy some quality stocks and watch his money go to work. It’s hard to think about the future when you’re that young, but a little financial savvy now could have your son retiring before he turns 40. If nothing else, make sure you explain how debilitating debt can be. With his whole life ahead of him, taking on excessive loans and running up credit cards can put everything on pause. If he understands that, I’m sure he’ll get the rest of the pieces to fall into place. Thanks for the question! Legal Disclaimer: Information presented is for educational purposes only and is not an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Be sure to first consult with a qualified financial adviser and/or tax professional before implementing any strategy discussed herein. To submit a question to be answered in this column, please send it via email to Question@GoFarWithKovar.com or via USPS to Taylor Kovar, 415 S 1st St, Suite 300, Lufkin, TX 75901.
Living with children “Are you afraid of your child/ children?” I query folks who testify to children who frequently engage in John flagrant Rosemond antisocial behavior – tantrums, brazen disrespect, and belligerent disobedience being the top three. I cannot recall an exception to parents – hundreds and counting – answering “Yes.” Therefore, it seems that fear of one’s child and major discipline problems are somehow related. Which came first? I suspect they develop simultaneously. Misbehavior begets anxiety, then downright fear which begets even more outrageous misbehavior, begetting even more paralyzing fear, and so on. If pressed on the issue, I’d say the misbehavior comes first. A toddler’s terribleness is capable of destroying romantic fantasies concerning human nature, rendering parents emotionally traumatized, in one day. Invariably, the parents are looking for some consequence-based discipline method that can only be obtained from a victim of the ivory tower, but no method is going to work as long as they are afraid. What are they afraid of, anyway? They tell me, in so many words, that they never imagined a child who was loved could act so badly; that they feel powerless in the face of his tyrannical tirades; that they interpret his badness to mean they are bad parents. They are entrapped in confusion, disillusionment, anger, guilt, selfdoubt, and overwhelming anxiety. The syndrome is incapacitating. It drives many of these folks to seek the help of mental health professionals whose modus operandi can be reduced to test, diagnose, and medicate. Do things get better? For some, perhaps, but having been there, I long ago concluded that playing it by the book might make things less obvious in the short run but never “sticks.” Furthermore, that sort of formulaic approach usually worsens things in the long
haul. The “trick,” if you will, is for these parents to grasp the paradoxical importance of not caring. Their problem is that they care what their child thinks and feels. They assign deep philosophical meaning to their child’s outbursts, which are nothing but equal parts dumb and insane. Their new parenting mantra must become, “We no longer care how you feel about the decisions we make, what you think of us at any given moment, how you want things to go around here, and the like, but be assured, if it came down to the last seat in the lifeboat, it’s yours.” Benevolent detachment in the age of parent-child bonding? Like I said, it’s paradoxical. The parents need to learn to substitute compassion for fear, anger, guilt, and other emotional responses that lead straight to efforts at negotiation; that is, any and all efforts to pacify the child. They must be willing, in other words, for things to get worse for a time. There is much truth in the well-known adage. Compassion? Yes indeed. The child is in pain. There is no such thing as a happy child who cannot stop acting in no one’s best interests, least of all his own. Under the circumstances, teaching the parents to embody and properly convey authority amounts to a rescue operation. Proper consequences – making the child offers he cannot refuse, but will anyway because he’s not thinking straight – are part of the recipe but proper consequences absent a proper parental attitude will accomplish nothing in the long run. As they say about baseball pitching, it’s all in the delivery. Family psychologist John Rosemond: johnrosemond.com, p arentguru.com. John Rosemond has worked with families, children, and parents since 1971 in the field of family psychology. In 1971, John earned his masters in psychology from Western Illinois University and was elected to the Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society.
