This theme is getting a lot of discussion among the active-duty & Reserves families. A week or so ago I read an article on how parents/spouses felt one way about their serving in the military but felt completely different about their kids joining. I've looked around for it and I'm clueless where I read it, but it was probably a military website. Any of you other veterans seen what I'm so poorly describing?
My advice, as a mother, is this:
Tell him that you will not sign.
When he is old enough to sign on his own, you need to support his decision concerning the Army completely and without reservations. But right now, he is too young to make this decision on his own. Right now, he should be exploring all of life's options and preparing, not rushing into this or any other decision.
W2R, your response is an example of a parent's concerns which I've seen many times. I can understand a parent who doesn't want anyone joining the military, but what about a parent who just doesn't want
their kid joining the military? Parents know what they're doing for the best of reasons, but it's all too easy for a kid to perceive this as unfair treatment. And we know what happens when a parent's denial of permission makes the forbidden even more attractive.
Maybe educational full disclosure is a better vaccine than censure. When our kid was seduced by USNA, everyone else told her about the fun so we pushed really hard to make sure she understood what she was getting into along with that. (I gave her a personal tour of Memorial Hall, which has thousands of square feet of bronze plaques listing alumni & mids killed on active duty. I told her about each of my classmates on the '82 plaque, one of them a roommate, and how they'd died. Then 14 years old, it drove her literally to tears.) Every time you see them doing something fun or "adult", ask them how they'd feel if they could only do it with the permission of the chain of command. Ask them how they'd feel getting "Woo-hoo, spring break!" and "Dear John" letters from their high-school classmates while they're sweating in the dirt. Ask them how they'll feel at the fifth high school reunion when their classmates are going to grad school or pulling down jobs at Fortune 500 companies, when they're barely earning five figures or just starting college.
Our kid has had to spend her entire life with people who have done amazing things, tell the funniest & most fantastic stories, traveled all over the world, met the most incredible personalities, live in a great house in Hawaii, and retired in their 40s. How in the world could she NOT want to join the military? How could she NOT want to be like the host of pioneering women & American heroes we've had sitting around our dinner table for the last decade?
Sometimes the military is just a way to vocalize a teen's fears that they have no skills, no contacts, no experience, and no future-- which is why the military says "No problem!" I've told our kid countless times that when she wakes up one morning in Bancroft Hall to realize that she's made a horrible mistake, I want her to appreciate that it's her own damn fault that she's worked so hard to achieve. We've taken great care to point out just as many bad things about USNA as the good, and we've done the same for NROTC. Over the last 18 months she's realized that she doesn't have to join the military to learn the skills we're teaching her. She's realizing that she can get a job all by herself without govt subsidies. She's realizing that good kids can get college scholarships instead of school loans. She's realizing that if she nails her grades and her SATs that she can go to college just about anywhere, and now we joke about USNA being her "safety school".
When parents say "No, you're not old enough for us to endorse the possibility of your getting killed or disabled", we hear parent talk for "I love you." But what a kid hears is "You're not old enough or mature enough to make your own decisions and I'm not going to be responsible for this." Not only would that cause a kid to shut down the dialogue, it might even force them to feel obligated to join the military to "prove" themselves. They're not joining the military any more because it's their idea of a good career/experience, but rather they're joining the military to show their parents that they're capable of making adult decisions. Is that really what we parents want their motivation to be?
We entertained their fantasies of being police officers & firefighters & Presidents, but we made sure they understood what the job was all about. Why not do the same for the military?
Not, of course, that I'm personalizing any of this.
When we are young, we want desperately to be older. Only time will make that happen, though.
I think every veteran would agree that if you want to grow old fast, there's no place like the military...