Reply to How would you handle a 15 yo talking about getting a matching tattoo with a friend who is dying

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Reply to "How would you handle a 15 yo talking about getting a matching tattoo with a friend who is dying"

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[quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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