Life’s Not Fair
All creatures are born with genetic codes that send instinctive signals to do certain behavior at various stages of their development. While retirees wait until they hit their 60’s and 70’s to migrate to
Children have a complex set of genetic messages that kick in when outside stimuli prompt them. Some instincts never develop unless the conditions are right. Such is the case with the CPA instinct. An only child may never receive the genetic signal to become a Certified Public Accountant. However, a child with one or more siblings will get a clear signal to become an expert Bookkeeper at around the age of three. From that point on they will keep a concise ledger sheet on each family member, tracking debits and credits, and constantly drawing comparisons between them.
Sibling rivalry is in fact, the issuance of a periodic balance sheet that the child has spent countless hours computing.
“He got more candy than I did!” - determined after extensive inventories were conducted and personal shortages discovered.
Often the accounting will extend beyond goods and call into play a reckoning of privileges as well.
“I didn’t get to stay up that late when I was her age!”
In some cases, the audit will even precede the child’s birth. When our younger son was eight years old we were watching some early video tapes of his older brother. Josh seized the opportunity, and began a verbal financial report that lasted for years. It was a very complex and detailed analysis of everything his brother received for those three years before he was born. For a decade we heard about “the three years that Ben got that I missed out on.” Each time the subject was brought up, Josh would yell,
“IT’S NOT FAIR!”
How does the parent deal with such accurate and precise accounting? First, recognize that your child is really doing you a favor. After dealing with years of this type of intense scrutiny of the distribution of wealth and services, if you ever get an IRS audit, it will seem like a walk in the park.
There are several ways you can respond when the CPA genetic message kicks in:
If you have the energy, you can conduct an audit of your own, the goal being to prove the child is in error. There must be some flaw in their record keeping, thus weakening their ability to use their ledger sheet to leverage more out of you.
You can try logic, although many would argue that you’d stand a better chance of convincing the sun not to shine than to get a child to accept they have received as much as their siblings. You can use mathematical formulas to prove that, even though their records show their siblings have received more to date, based on statistical probabilities and actuarial tables, over their lifetime they will ultimately be on an equal footing with the “privileged” relative. You can point out that their older brother or sister will probably die before them, thus giving them an open field to reap all they desire at harvest time.
Tell them how little you received by comparison as a child, and how much more they have than the nomads of the Serengeti desert.
Last but not least, when you hear the tribal chant, “IT’S NOT FAIR!” you can simply reply, “Life isn’t fair, and the sooner you understand that the happier you’ll be. If life were fair, I’d be six feet tall with a full head of hair and in a sit-com with Jennifer Aniston.”
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