Kids......: ( - Page 1

       Here are my two daughters with their first two lesson ponies....They assured me they would ride forever.....The beautiful gray mare is Rain our talented and successful English Pleasure mare....

              .............Rain now sits at the trainers because no one has time.......


                  I just brought home our Western Pleasure gelding and he is now a handsome pasture ornament.. Rain will be coming home too....Two beautiful and talented horses out to pasture........I am so sad.....KIDS.....: (



                       

Can you adopt me? I'll ride :) I have the time but no place to put one right now. One day <sigh>

Melissa

Lovely mare!  Perhaps that is why my parents fought my riding growing up I worked cleaning kennels and a bather to get my lessons and ride time on the horses as a teen. I appreciated it and worked hard for it.

  Both are very nice you can send the mare to me and she will have more attention than she could ever want lol

In my teens I worked as the barn manager for a nursery / boarding barn that also gave lessons.  One of my jobs was to coorediate the 'Working Student' program where kids came to learn about horses and parents sent kids to learn if they kids were really *really* going to dedicate to the horses.

By the time I got done with them for the summer the kids realized that it was a RESPONSIBILITY to own and work with a horse.  They then made the decision if they really wanted to stick with the sport or go do gymnastics.

If 10 kids started the program, by the end only 3 or 4 truly were horse crazy enough to stick with the responsibility.   We all keep in touch and 90% of them (in their late 20s now) still have and work with  horses.

    The pictures of the girls little are with their lesson ponies....The gray mare and the gelding are our personal horses we purchased for the girls........The gelding is a handsome, black, 15 year old Quarter Horse with wonderful conformation and a temperament to die for...Our mare has beautiful movement and is a showmanship machine and has an awesome trot and canter.....What were we thinking?......My husband keeps saying.....I TOLD YOU SO...: (

I blame teenage boys.

I blame parents.

I'm sorry but that is the source.  Parents give their little darlings anything they want without also providing the child with the understanding of the responsibility that goes along with what they receive.

It's one thing to play a guitar for a few months, then put it away in a closet and forget about it but an animal, whether it be a dog/gerbil/horse is not an innanimate object, yet kids learn to treat them as one in the same.

And we wonder why we have a 'disposable' mindset in this country where people just toss their dogs off in shelters and walk away when they're no longer cute puppies?  They're not taught any sense of accountability.

Not always the case. My daughter has been committed to dogs since she was old enough to hold a leash. Put a CD on someone else's dog when she was nine years old. When she was 11 I finally gave her a dog of her own. Her committment to that dog was 100% until the discovery of boys. She still loves her, and sport, but I have to nag A LOT more than I used to so she will go out and work her dog.

As a parent, there is the constant inner question, "Am I giving in to my kids whim? If I say no, am I crushing what could truly be my child's calling?" It's not an easy thing to discern this even in your own child. She begged me to be in band, played clarinet for three years then quit. Then she wanted to play guitar, I told her she could save up her own money for one and pay for her own lessons. She still can't play guitar.

I know of an 11 year old girl who was given a mastiff puppy, after three other dogs didn't work out, so that "she can breed her and have puppies for the experience because she wants to be a vet." I am not kidding.

Sometimes kids are spoiled, sometimes not. I guarantee you if we kept girls on one planet and boys on another until 25 my daughter would be up at the crack of dawn to train every day without being asked and Deanna girl's would still be riding.

We'll have to accept we had different experiences then.

The girls (and the odd boy) who were truly horse mad, dedicated to the horses and their riding, never turned a hair when the opposite sex came into the mix.  Either the BF/GF was horsey as well or they didn't exist.

It was the girls (and boys) who were all about how pretty their breeches looked and who didn't want to get dirty, grooming or tacking up their own pony who were the ones who wandered off as soon as hormones kicked in.

That's what the working student program tended to weed through.  The kids who committed to it and thrived on it stayed with horses through hormone changes, the works.  The ones who didn't want to do the work, walked away.

             Contrary to what some might think we thought long and hard before buying our horses. We made lots of sacrifices and still do to provide our girls with nice, quality horses... Our girls rode for 5 years before we bought our horses and worked very hard with their trainer to take care of them... Our trainer, as well as me and my husband were very diligent to instill the responsibility of owning a living creature ....We took a gamble and lost......Boys were the one hurdle the horses could not jump............We do not take our responsibilities lightly, they will come home and live the remander of their lives with our family.....They are part of our family....