We have had family discussions about following rules and having to figure out when rules should be broken and when they shouldn't. My husband told us about a time when he worked as an army first sergeant and there was a rule that they had to stay out in the field for a certain number of days as part of training. There was an occasion when one of his soldiers got sick and he could tell by looking at him that he needed medical attention, but an officer refused to give him permission to take the soldier to the hospital because it was "against the rules" and threatened to court martial my husband if he disobeyed orders. My husband took the soldier to the hospital anyway and by doing so saved the soldier's life. The soldier's appendix had ruptured. He told our son that there are times when rules have to be broken. We hope that by talking about some of our life experiences and facilitating his education that he will acquire both the knowledge and the ability to make the right decisions in own life.
A frequent topic of discussion in our family is choices. We can choose to not follow rules and it works out okay for some people but from what I have seen, it more often doesn't work out very well. It also seems like there are a lot of unwritten rules where we live and as kind of an outside the box family in a small town in a state that still has cow chip throwing contests, we seem to already be breaking some of them without even trying.
It always looked to me like my stepson tried to defy all of those "unwritten rules" especially the ones about appearance. I know that appearance isn't supposed to matter, but where I live you are expected to look a certain way if you expect to get a job in anything except of course as an IT person. When my stepson live with us he wore his hair with green streaks in it, very long, tied in a pony tail. This pretty much guaranteed that he would not be able to find a job easily in our area.
I don't think my son would be happy living the way his half-brother is living. He wouldn't be able to afford video games or even think about saving money to visit Japan someday. He says he is willing to work for what he wants, of course he is not even ten years old yet so that might change. I sometimes wonder what my stepson will do to support himself later on in life when he is physically not able to work since he is not able to save money.
I probably look at some of this differently because of my life experiences, I studied accounting instead of engineering and I want to know that my son can some day can support himself and his family. Speaking from experience, life is harder when you are worried that you might not have enough money to pay all of your bills and have a decent standard of living.
I want my son to get a good college education whatever it takes, even if he has to follow rules that he doesn't like. If he gets a scholarship at a university that caters to outside the box people, that's great but otherwise it might be a good idea for him to try to live by the rules.
