18-year-old refuses to give her parents her car keys after they demand she leave her job to drive her 16-year-old and 14-year-old siblings around as a punishment for violating her strict curfew: ‘The car is mine, a gift from my grandmother that I pay for’ – FAIL Blog

Of course, as you’re about to learn, freedom is just another prison, and being an adult is more about ever-increasing responsibility and tasks to complete than anything else.

As your parents ask you to run more errands for them and to run your siblings around town, you will quickly realize that you grossly underestimated just what a huge time investment all of this is for your parents:  dropping you and your siblings off at places for sports or recreational activities, just to come and pick you up a short while later. Now, as you’re doing all of this, you’re really starting to appreciate and grow frustrated at how time-consuming and costly (gas money doesn’t grow on trees) all of this is.

Still, this should be treated as a responsibility, not a punishment; framing it that way was never going to get any teen or young adult to agree to it, and it’s really just not the right way to go about assigning that chore or punishing for violating curfew. 

This all came to a head in this account of events, where this 18-year-old shared how she had broken curfew by 20 minutes while living at her parents’ house. Despite having texted ahead to let her parents know she would be late, she was saddled with the “punishment” of being her parents’ personal chauffeur to and from their respective jobs and babysitting gigs. The fact that achieving this wasn’t possible according to her own work schedule led her parents to suggest she merely adjust her work hours to compensate. This, of course, would go over like a lead balloon with her employer, and as you can imagine, employers that employee young adults like this simply hate being told by parents when their staff can and can’t work. 

The fact that they are trying to intervene and get her fired from her job seems like a method of maintaining control over her. At 18 years old, she should be able to work her job without her parents interfering just to inflict some misguided form of punishment; that really is the core of the issue here. That and even though she is still in high school, at 18 years old, she should be granted more self-determination over her curfew than she currently is.