How would you handle a 15 yo talking about getting a matching tattoo with a friend who is dying
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Anonymous
| This would be a no brainer to me. The girl can get the tattoo and your daughter go with her to get it. However, your daughter may get a matching one when she is of legal age. I am not sure why she has to do it at 15. It would still match at age 18... |
Anonymous
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It really seems unfair to BOTH of these kids that their wishes are being dismissed or minimized due only to their age. I work with adolescents, and one thing that they feel pretty strongly across the board is that many if not most adults do not take the time to understand why adolescents care about what they care about and end up being very dismissive of the adolescents themselves. Posts about how 15yo are not adults and cannot make adult decisions. That is certainly true for SOME 15yo. It is not universally true for all 15yo, which should be painfully obvious to anyone who has met more than one adolescent.
OP, what is relevant to your decision is YOUR SPECIFIC KID. Not what PPs think about tattoos in general or for adolescents or what kind of remembrance is the best for this particular situation. It is WILDLY dismissive to hear this thoughtful personal thing that they have come up with and say, "maybe you could just get a necklace instead!" I know ZERO 15yo who would hear that and feel supported or understood. I say this as a person who had a very close friend die at 16. It would have been very meaningful to me if we had been able to do something like this. Grief manifests differently for different people. I think about my friend often - maybe not every day anymore because it's been decades since she died, but often enough that the tattoo would not be an EXTRA reminder so much as a visible reminder of something I already think about regularly. |
Anonymous
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I think it would be a precious gift to the girl and her family. Knowing someone is carrying a reminder of their girl around for the rest of their life would mean a lot to them.
I also think the damage done by not allowing the girls to grieve in their own way might be more damaging than having to do laser removal treatment 20 years down the road (which I doubt she'd want to do anyway). I don't have any tattoos to give perspective. It's too permanent for me. But can see why a parent might make an exception in this case. |
Anonymous
Yes, actually I did. A friend to diabetes, and a close cousin I was friends with to cancer, both in childhood. And I didn't say how I think OP's child will grieve. I just pointed out that if her friend DIDN'T die, it's entirely possible they would just naturally drift apart. Getting a tattoo forces a permanency to the friendship. |
Anonymous
Her friend will be dead when she's 18 and part of the idea is that it's something they can do together |
Anonymous
Your post illustrates exactly allowing a 15 year to do this is so troubling. A parent must be a cooler head in the adolescent whirlwind of emotion. |
Anonymous
But the child will die and that will have it's own permanency. She won't grow up and move away. They won't grow apart. She will die. OP's child will grieve and grow and do all of the things that the living do. What difference does it make that if things were different, they would be different? I don't like tattoos. I wouldn't choose to get one. But the choice here is between asserting your parental authority to override your child's growing autonomy. Sometimes, that is necessary to protect them from seriously dangerous things. If this was a question of "hey mom, I wanna do heroin with my friend," then probably everyone would feel differently. But the long-term harm of having a tattoo is that your body doesn't look like you might prefer. Is it worth alienating a child at such a critical time to prevent that? I would much rather do what I could to protect my child from their grief-stricken actions than worry about the small potatoes of some judgey mom at swim club. I would impress upon the child that this is a serious decision and not one to make lightly, but otherwise what is the real harm of getting the tattoo? The real harm of forbidding it is that you damage you set your authority in opposition to the emotional pain of a loss, while telling them they're too young to understand. To me, that sounds like daring your kid to do some dumb stuff without consulting you because they believe their grown. Teenagers push boundaries anyway, best that that they don't adopt a forgiveness instead of permission attitude. |
Anonymous
As a pediatrician, THANK YOU! I hate being asked for advice on things that boil down to “that’s a parenting decision you should make for yourself”. I’ve had parents call me and ask me to tell their children to wear coats when it’s cold outside. Like…. |
Anonymous
And the cooler head chooses to this fight? What is the real long-term harm of a tattoo? Regret? Laser removal? Being the cooler head doesn't mean making every choice for your child, or even every serious choice for your child. |
Anonymous
How sad- “you can go with your friend and tell her you’ll be allowed to get your own at 18, the only reason she is getting it earlier is because she will be dead by 18. You can tell her that since you aren’t dying , you’ll get yours later”. Can you imagine this conversation playing out? |
Anonymous
No, none of these people who are so strident in that they would forget this are able to imagine the actual conversation with their child. They fall back on "I'm the parent, and my responsibility is to parent my child" and that's the end of it on this board. Everyone more or less knows it's nowhere near that simple or easy, but it doesn't matter because tattoos are trashy and 15yo are too immature to make permanent decisions, apparently. |
Anonymous
+1 million. |
Anonymous
I'm so sorry 
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Anonymous
The DCUM obsession with $ and saving $ is sick. |
Anonymous
I have two grown boys and this should be added to the list of nightmare mother-in-law. |