One of my daughters works in housekeeping during the summers, where she cleans up after guests who have stayed for conferences and workshops. While I know that everyone can be absent-minded at times, some groups leave behind more of their belongings than others. One particular group, while different individuals each summer but same basic group, leave behind an amazing amount of nearly-new condition belongings. The demographics for this group include, teen, female, and privileged enough to afford a couple of weeks at a dance workshop. Among the things left behind this year there was a beautiful sweater in like-new condition, a leotard, a brand-new, still in sealed packaging tube of mascara, and many other items.
We were talking about why this group leaves behind belongings that any young girl/woman would covet. Our conclusion was that these young girls and women must feel that their belongings can easily be replaced, without any financial hardship to them individually. We are guessing that their parents pay for all of their needs, and may also provide a healthy allowance for wants. If the girls/women have summer jobs, the money they earn may be mostly for discretionary spending. To them, the amount they earn in a summer job, or is given to them by parents in the form of allowance, must be enough to cover replacing lost belongings, without any extra labor on their part. However, for their parents, I imagine having a child who left behind that sweater that they "just had to have", or the new mascara that they needed money to buy, must be confounding and infuriating at times.
On the child's part, some of this absent-mindedness is due to age, teenage distractions, and lack of having to pay for anything truly consequential, like rent, groceries, electricity. But I also think that some of this is due to being given so much, too freely. If parents will always replace a lost item, then why should a teen take any extra care not to lose belongings. I'm not bashing the parents, at least not a lot, as I had younger children once, too. I remember feeling very badly for my kids when they lost something that they cherished. And I remember patching up a stuffed toy repeatedly, after a child tore it up, through rough play. I also remember buying a replacement toy for another child, when the beloved one was lost. As the parent, we want our children to not feel the pain of loss of any kind. We want to stop the hurt.
When I was in middle school, I had a brand-new pair of blue jeans to wear at the beginning of seventh grade. This was the first year that girls could wear blue jeans to school in my district. I was running to lunch to meet my friends and I tripped and fell, and tore a hole in the knee. I was so upset about that hole -- my brand-new jeans! Even so, I still thought that my mom would replace them with a new pair. But she didn't. Instead, we went to the fabric store and she bought a patch in the shape of an orange. It was the only decorative patch large enough to fit over the hole. I'm sure that I begged and pleaded for new jeans, but she was firm. She probably wanted to make my hurt go away, but she was wiser, and likely on a tight budget, herself. I continued to wear the patched jeans, with the big orange, until I outgrew them. And the patch was a reminder of the loss I had felt when my new jeans were no longer pristine, and urged me to be more careful. This type of lesson was repeated throughout my childhood. A broken thermos meant that I had to bring a clunky old thermos with my lunchbox, instead of the cutesy one that was its original companion. A lost game token meant that we had to use a penny in the game set, when playing with three other friends, instead of the fun plastic token the game came with. If something was repairable, like grease stains on my pants from the bicycle chain, then my mother showed me how to repair or remove a stain. She didn't just do it for me. My mother was compassionate, generous, loving, but she was also wise enough to know that I needed repeated lessons on taking care of my belongings.
I do wonder about the young girls/women that my daughter cleaned up after. Will their parents let them feel the loss of the forgotten items? Or will the parents rush out to buy replacements? Perhaps the girl/woman won't even notice she left behind her like-new American Eagle sweater, or leotard, or tube of mascara she just purchased and didn't even own long enough to take it out of the packaging. Maybe I'm just being too hard on a age-group that is inherently distracted and forgetful. What do you think?
