To Bail Your Kid Out Of Trouble or Not?

Update included at bottom:

Good question to myself...

I have this daughter, age 21, who spent 7/8 of her life toeing the line. She made fab grades, excelled in volleyball and track, received a college scholarship to study architecture at a gorgeous university...the list of her accomplishments and achievements ("over" sometimes) would bore you. There was never a time I worried about her doing her homework, missing curfew without a call, getting drunk or smoking weed. I'm painting a picture of an easy kid to raise.

She isn't perfect, that's for sure. She argues with her brother whenever they're together...drives me beyond insane. She's messy, and stubborn, and unforgiving when crossed. I'm sure, with time, I could come up with other examples of her "lesser strengths".

My daughter's biggest "lesser strength" is her Indy 500-like driving or, I should say, what USED to be her Andretti-esque skills. This became her achilles heel.

In the state of Illinois, those under the age of 21 can not have two moving violations to retain their driver's license. Well Mandy Andretti (aka darling daughter), had three between the ages of 18 and 20. She is a speeder!

The short story is in March 2011 it all caught up with her and she received a personal letter from the State of Illinois. They requested her license be mailed to them and to plan on it staying there until March 2012. We let her suffer the consequences without much help from us and I'm okay with that. She wanted to handle it and some mistakes were made there as well. I'm not entirely sure what we could have done besides help her hire the attorney anyway. There were some tears but nothing could be done at that point but to SUCK IT UP!

She has friends to run errands with at school. At home, she has me, who often forgets she doesn't drive and gets exasperated when I realize I'm her wheels (inconvenient!). She says its very freeing to be a non-driver...FOR HER!

Can she just make it two more months without any problems?

Today, I got the call! Can it ever be drama free? Now we have to figure out what kind of help we should give her this time. Nothing super serious but who says it won't screw up her ability to drive in 2012?

Update:


My girl just called with an update. She and her attorney agreed that an important piece of information should be provided to the Assistant Prosecutor (she previously didn't know about my daughter's speeding problems and her license suspension for such). They felt full disclosure would be better than the information coming out in the future, though the likelihood was slim, and the consequences much higher. The Prosecutor thanked them for their honesty and said the previously unknown issue wouldn't have factored in anyway. However, my daughter's lesson was something we've talked about since she was little. The truth is ALWAYS better.