Dear Richard Madeley: My daughter left our best camping gear at Glastonbury
My 19-year-old daughter recently returned from the Glastonbury festival with bright eyes and a rich hoard of intense life experiences, but without the small yet fairly high-end tent and sleeping bag we had lent her for the weekend. She seemed not to see this as an issue (we had stressed the fact that these weren't disposable items, but clearly we didn't stress it strongly enough), and her vague account of how she came to mislay her camping equipment failed to convince.
The worst-case scenario is that our gear was irredeemably soiled during some kind of drug-fuelled saturnalia – an image that no parent would wish to countenance – but I think it is more likely that, swayed by peer pressure from friends and neighbours with cheaper tents and/or richer parents than hers, she just grabbed her backpack (this was hers, and has made it back from Somerset largely unscathed) and wafted off to the bus stop.
The drifts of abandoned camping gear littering the site at the end of the festival have always seemed mildly obscene to me, and I'm disappointed in our child (though I realise she is technically not a child anymore). We have always been pretty liberal about money with her, but I am minded to take the cost of replacing these things out of her allowance. Should I?
– P, Suffolk
Dear P,
I'm a pretty liberal, relaxed parent myself. (At least I think I am. Maybe my kids would beg to differ). But I'm sorry – I think your daughter is taking liberties (which is the politer way of putting it. It's not quite how I expressed it in more muscular fashion to my wife just now after I'd read your letter).
You made it crystal-clear when you lent the darling daughter some pretty expensive camping gear that you expected it back more or less in one piece. Instead, it's vanished into the Great Glastonbury Gap, and you've been proffered only the vaguest reasons why.
That simply won't do. It doesn't matter if the tent, etc, was left behind out of sheer laziness or because it was discarded after being soiled beyond redemption. Either way it was your daughter's responsibility to bring it home. If she'd offered a heartfelt excuse and apology for failing to do so, fair enough. Stuff happens. But you say she was vague and offhand about the whole thing.
Well, fine. That's your cue to be specific and focused about it. Calculate the cost of replacing tent, sleeping bag, etc, like for like, and, yes, deduct that exact amount from your daughter's next allowance. Be ruthless about it. No negotiation.
She needs to grow up and it's your responsibility as her parents to encourage and enable that. Sometimes that means showing a bit of tough love. And frankly, P, I can think of shorter, sharper shocks than this one.
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