You Brought What to School?

When you have children, you try so hard to teach them to make good decisions when you are not with them.

You teach them that integrity means doing the right thing when no one is looking.

You teach them to have confidence in and respect for themselves.

You help them learn self-worth and believe they are a worthy friend.

You teach them the value of a dollar and try to start them down the road to better spending habits than the ones you have.

My Landen Allbritton blew all that sh!t out of the water this week, when he snuck out of the house with $20 of his allowance to pay some kid on the playground to be his friend.

An important point to make about Landen in this story is that he wants everybody to like him. Every damn body. And he can be a little aggressive in those pursuits, and that usually results in at least half of the third grade not wanting to play with him. Landen's best friends cycle in and out. He's not on speaking terms with most of the kids who came to his birthday party. A set of kids who wanted nothing to do with him six months ago have asked to be waitlisted to the next birthday party.

Now, apparently all these little enterprising third graders have formed "companies" that sell paper toys to their peers. There are company "owners," who employ the kids who are good at making paper toys. Then there are the "sellers" who go out and peddle the paper toys to kids on the playground. Index cards serve as the currency for these exchanges. I do not know who came up with this scheme, and I hate him, so I hope it was not my kid.

Not true, because we do teach our children that hating is wrong.

Except when it isn't.

On Tuesday, Landen could not get any of the other kids to be part of his company, so some loanshark-in-the-making offered to staff Landen's company for $20 in cash. Which means that when he came home on Tuesday, he was plotting to sneak that money out of my house on Wednesday morning, which he did.

We do not teach quantity of friends. We teach quality of them. And I'm fairly certain that there are many imprisoned politicians who will attest to the fact that the kind of friends you have to pay are not truly the kind of friends you want.

A teacher witnessed the money changing hands and shut down the deal. Landen went into hysterics about how much trouble he was going to get in when he got home for sneaking money out of our house, so he was sent to the assistant principal. The woman is now very familiar with us and our family, and she seemed delighted to be calling just to tell me one of my sons was not in trouble.

When he got home, I told him that a) Not everyone is going to like him, but we do not have to beg people to be our friend; b) that he should only spend money on things he will be able to hold in his hand a week from now; c) that paying someone to do what you want them to is a felony; and d) do not ever think that I will not find out, because I always will. In this case, I know how much money is in that wallet and when he turned up short on his next trip to Target, he would have been busted anyway. He did manage to get out an "Even though it was my money!" justification.

At this point in the year - after the Allbritton boys have fought each other, slapped and kicked other students, flipped the bird, forged a signature and been suspended - you really hope that when the school calls, it is because someone has vomited or is bleeding. They are able to make light of this, because when I answered the phone, the assistant principal told me straight out the gate that no one was in trouble. They were concerned about why Landen would think he needed to pay people to be his friend. It's just heartbreaking if you think about it like that.

I am concerned that I've got one practicing the white collar crime of forgery and one practicing bribery, both unsuccessfully I should point out, and that all those episodes of "Beyond Scared Straight" we watched may have been a smooth waste of time.