Monday, March 4, 2019

Relinking consequences to the decision maker

Kubota still lives at home with us. He turns twenty this month.

One of the stresses of having adult children living with us is they are not quite adults.

For one thing, he likes to fiddle with the temperature rather than put on a warmer shirt or take one off.

He gets overly warm, he opens a window. He gets too cold, he cranks up the heat. Notice that I did not say, "He closes the window and turns up the heat."

When he wants to get warm in a hurry, he cranks the set-point up to 85, convinced that the furnace will put out more BTU per hour.

The intricacies of the heating system and fuel oil budget are invisible to him.

Words bounce off. A.) He is a guy. B.) He is almost twenty.

After getting permission from the ever wise, compassionate and beautiful Mrs ERJ I turned the damper on the heating duct to Kubota's room completely off.

Kubota left for the day. I closed his room door. His window was opened an inch. The wind-chill is -1 with a 19 degree F actual.

He came home earlier than expected. Upon opening his bedroom door he said "Holy crap! It is cold enough to freeze the spheres off a snowman in here!"

"Is your window open?" I asked.

I suspect this problem will be self correcting.

6 comments:

  1. Naw. He is still convinced he is all-knowing and you are a dumbass.

    That may change when he is responsible for his own heating and rent costs.

    Or maybe not.

    That's what it took for me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. My son just moved out this week into the house he just bought.
    This should be good :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. The timing for your post is perfect. I have a 15 yr old son with Asperger's who knows wayyy more than I do about everything. Ok, in his areas of interest such as anime he is correct. IN regards to 90% of the real world like most teens he isn't even close. We are learning to do along the lines of what you are doing. Since he constantly rejects our knowledge/advice my new rule of thumb is to try once to give him the right advice and then ( If doing things his way wont be too dangerous ) yeah...he gets to do it his way. Its all part of life. As I aged , from 25 on, I was amazed at how much smarter my parents got. ( Or maybe they always were and I finally listented)

    ReplyDelete
  4. I can sympathize with you. I swear my son has never grasped the concept of how a thermostat works.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Light switches. They work both ways, but there's no way to tell that's the case in my house. Sigh.

    ReplyDelete

Readers who are willing to comment make this a better blog. Civil dialog is a valuable thing.