Daddy's Home by Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein for October 01, 2018

try asking in 30 YEARS, boy, and we shall see if you’ll have your father’s new computer

The kid better start mowing lawns, get a paper route, wash cars, take incriminating photos, something to make money. If it were my kid, and he was old enough and responsible enough to have his own computer, I would tell the kid to make money, and I would meet him half way.

By the time you get that new computer, it will be obsolete.

What took him so long?

Get a paper route or some other character-building menial labor job, leech!

Ok…. today we get…. TWO words.

Tony’s question is “That long?”

Obviously, 30 seconds is comedic exaggeration….

it really is a problem for parents, these days.

There’s so much technology all around.

Sure, Elliot “should” work for his computer….

But some of you forget…. he’s only 10 years old.

Weren’t you a “leech” at 10?

Unless you’re one of those families on YouTube raising 6 children on a 5 acre homestead in the mountains,

keeping them busy milking cows and picking beans…

not that there’s anything wrong with that….

The likelihood is, you’ll want tech, and so will kids too young to work,.

Deciding what’s age-appropriate is a battle between your instincts and the peer pressure they encounter…

On adult minimum wage it’s hard to earn enough for a computer, and a cell phone.

People want to pay a 10-year-old a dollar for a chore.

Newspaper routes go to adults with cars, not 5th graders.

You may not think he’s responsible enough anyway…

But his friends have that stuff, and by 5th grade, they do homework, communicate and entertain each other with it.

Schools nowadays expect a child to have a computer… or at least access to one in the home.

It’s hard, though sometimes necessary, to explain financial realities to a middle school child,

Must he wait till he’s old enough to earn hundreds of dollars on his own?

Some parents place a higher priority than others on computer literacy, or understanding technology, or keeping up with friends.

But a kid Elliot’s age is likely to have some electronics, mostly bought by parents.

The trick is teaching them responsibility and patience.

Long is a relative concept. Just ask a mayfly.

How ’bout now?

Yeah. And? That’s later.

Wait until you have to get a new one. For PCs that means 2 operating systems updates, and only if you have to get a complete new one. You might be able to get away with just a new mother board. For Apples, it depends. I had an older machine that I could not upgrade after Snow Leopard and I held out for about two more years and the video card finally went. The one I have now is just fine, but I am not upgrading to Mojave until after Xmas. by then the bugs should be fixed.

I keep telling the wife that long

So what do you expect from a kid with such a short attention span.