Now now everyone!! Is the heat getting to us all?!
Just beginning to cool down here thankfully and a huge storm is forecast. Black skies and the wind is picking up. Will quite ruin the teenage son’s big night out at his first ever fête. evil cackle
3 Likes
i do not think its out of hand its each of us has our own specific views on how to bring up our kids. I am just thankful I live in a country where we are able to choose how to bring up our kids and not brainwashed to think one way and to think differently is a criminal act.
1 Like
As an aside, I work closely with a lot of military personnel and many of them have told me that had they not gone into the forces they could have well fallen off the straight and narrow.
Personally I think some form of civic service is a great idea - kids need rules and structure and values and sadly, many of them don’t get that at home.
As far as doing jobs go, our three have always has a lot of jobs (and I mean a lot) to do round the house (unpaid) - when they have done exceptional amounts of extra work we have bunged them some cash or paid for extras. every family has their own way of dealing with the jobs / money / pocket money debate and I don’t believe there is one perfect solution. Otherwise someone would have written the book and made a fortune!
The upside of this for them is that they have learned to work well and hard and it has had numerous beneficial spinoffs for them, i.e they coped with the prepa workload better than most, they are in demand for paid employment as our friends/ contacts know that they work better than most adults ( a big plus if you are a teenager in rural France!), ones been offered a job as a result of her performance during her internship, another gets taken to the stables to help and gets extra riding in return…
But I know lots of my contemporaries think I am a chore nazi…!!
3 Likes
my kids love the chores.
My son loves to be first up and letting the dogs out and making sure the water bowls are ready for the dogs outside.
He also helps me do the dog baths and for that he gets 25% of the money we charge for it. he also has a bank account that has plenty of savings in it that he never touches.
1 Like
I think earning money for little jobs at that sort of age is great for children. I paid mine (and still do) for doing really tedious things like picking up pine cones from the lawn etc, they all have ‘normal’ jobs they aren’t paid for as well.
1 Like
You are right Simon 
Back in the sixties me and my sister got a threppny bit pocket money…sixpence from the faeries when we lost a tooth…my dad who worked in insurance set up “life cover” for our guineapigs at tuppence per month…x 
Good on them both 
I did a paper round from 12, my kids did their bit round the house for their pocket money, I see nothing at all wrong with that, I see lots wrong, with handing dosh out to them for ‘nothing’ 
1 Like
Well, when I was young, all my boy friends went to do their service militaire obligatoire. The first three months was hellish, a lot of marching, discipline etc … the rest of it, learning to drink, smoking herbs that make you laught … Anyway, all of them got good memories of it, and the bonus was to have a free licence to drive !
1 Like
Pretty well like my brother 
in the UK and Germany, he was a good swimmer so lots of ‘jollies’ too
But even he doesn’t think it’s a good idea.
Mark… “he” has opened a can of worms IMO. Only a small percentage of the women who apply are actually accepted… perhaps he could save money be refusing more male applicants instead… 
1 Like
Thank you for the explanation there has been confusion over this matter in my household today.
My image of the tough-guy is not yours. My father has a wine-belly, he acts, speaks and swears like Gerard Depardieu, and he is still able to kick b*tts. I don’t spend hours to the gym, I am not an alpha male, I don’t care about being a “chad” or a muscled guy, I am not overweight, I cycle to work, I do road cycling, I do mountainbiking. Not to exercise, just because I love cycling.
But, you are a british not a french. And french people have a real self-esteem problem. In France we have a real problem to have the right to wave our flag without being treated like far right moron. That is what I was meaning, being a patriot, without being a close-minded nationalist. You missed the sense of my words, not easy to really understand what people were meaning trough Internet. Especially between two different cultures.
In the UK, and every time I met young brits in Spain (Especially Benidorm and Marbella), they were all proud of their union jack flag. They were not hooligans nor nationalists. Just funny young people having fun and being proud to be british. You won’t see that with french millenials. I regret it. I regret that french people do agree with all that french bashing, coming especially from your british press. I regret that french people are not more proud to live here and to be native from here.
These were just my words, nothing nationalist or far right related, nothing “old fashioned male type mentality”.
The national service was the only situation where you could experience to meet people coming different social classes from yours, and especially the first moment in your life where you could meet guys of your age who weren’t able to read… It makes you more humble, more philosophic and less materialist.
Of course you don’t need that to be a nice person. I am just saying it wouldn’t be bad for some teens and young men to help them to frame their lives.
2 Likes
Thanks Maxime your detailed and thoughtful responses are very helpful, and eye-openers too. I am a stranger here still in France and will almost certainly be seen like that until my end time. I don’t mind, although I don’t want to be seen as a vexation to those I come into contact with. I have always felt something of an outsider. I was very impressed by the novels (and the deeper existential writings) of Camus in my teens.
Personally, I find French people to be more comfortable in their own skins than their English counterparts. It may be a geographical thing, we live in a small rural town in Normandy and the population density is astonishingly low by English standards, especially the South-East of England where we lived for 30 years before moving here. But I have lived in Africa too, and my wife is from Africa so I have a lot of experience of another very different culture, which throws a lot of light on to one’s own.
As I said in an earlier post I was wrong to mock you, and I am sorry for that too.
In England serious mental illness amongst young men is increasing exponentially and male suicide rates are disturbingly high. I don’t find that.young British men have much faith in or allegiance to the flag or other older institutions, although they may feign enthusiasm in the presence of a foreign peer. But maybe I am out of touch! My own children are now in their 40s and 50s!
Your father sounds a character. Some men find being a character helpful in coping with getting on in years, not, I hasten to say, that your father is like that. My own father was very much a man of his generation and class, but wasn’t able to develop his intellect or his creative talents because male culture in the 1920s, ‘30s and’ 40s could not tolerate men who departed from the ‘tough-guy’ stereotype, and my not conforming to those expectations disturbed him, and caused him shame.
I think gender stèreotypes are just cultural artefacts that are slowly giving way to a more subtle appreciation of the porosity of boundaries, and the wisdom of uncertainty. I think many young people think like that these days, but some are afraid of the trend.
1 Like
it’s funny to see other members reproaching you that you were rude to me, and then to read you apologise, I never took it on the cold shoulder. You fellow brits are too much phlegmatic and polite, we are in France, it is cool to insult your friends hahaha
2 Likes