Heads or Tails Behind the Gym
The school called about my son's coin game. He told me exactly where he learned it.
The call came from the school on a Tuesday. My son Michael was eleven, and the principal wanted to know if I was aware that he had been running a game behind the gym. Heads or tails, a quarter a flip, the other boys' lunch money.
I drove over in my work shirt with chalk still on the cuffs, ready to be angry. Michael sat on the bench outside the office with his hands folded, and when I asked him where he got such an idea, he looked at me like I had asked him where he got his ears.
"From you, Pop," he said. "You do it with the guys every Friday."
He was right. I did. Coin flips for who paid for coffee, then for who paid for dinner, then for things I did not tell his mother about. I never once thought of it as teaching. I thought he was in the other room. Kids are never in the other room.
On the drive home I gave him the speech. Gambling is foolish, it hurts people, you could lose everything. He nodded at every word. Then he asked me, very politely, if that meant I was going to stop on Fridays. I did not have an answer, and he noticed I did not have one.
That is the lesson that took me the longest. Children do not learn from the speech. They learn from the Friday. Whatever you tell them about money and risk, they are watching your hands to see if you mean it.
I did stop, eventually, though not that year, and I am not proud of how long it took. Michael is a grown man now with a mortgage and two boys, and he does not flip coins for anything. When I asked him once how he stayed clear of it, he said he saw where it led, up close.
I would have liked to teach him a better way than that.
If you are worried about what your kids are picking up from you, the National Problem Gambling Helpline is 1-800-MY-RESET, any hour.
They are watching your hands.
Sal
Children learn how to treat money and risk by watching what their parents do, not by listening to what their parents say. A parent who wants a child to stay clear of gambling has to model it, because kids copy the habit long before they understand the harm.