Two decades ago, when I was a young second-grade teacher, my students had a favorite complaint: “But that’s not fair!” They said it every time something didn’t go their way. At first it amused me, but eventually it became annoying. As any parent or teacher knows, kids can be relentless when they think justice is on their side.

So I decided to teach them what fair really meant. In our classroom, I explained, fair doesn’t mean everyone gets the same thing, it means everyone gets what they need. It took repetition and modeling, but eventually they accepted my definition. If only it were that easy with the rest of the world.

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A Crash Course in Fairness

This past week, my oldest daughter Riley passed her driver’s permit test, a milestone worth celebrating. But the road to that little plastic card gave her a first-hand lesson in fairness.

Like many oldest siblings, Riley carries the “oldest child curse”: a strong sense of responsibility and the need to get things right. She’s reliable to a fault. So when the time came to pursue her permit, she took the lead, researching requirements, scheduling practice drives, even blocking off time on the family calendar. Our role was simply to support her. After all, it was her initiative, her life, her goal.

What she didn’t know, what none of us fully anticipated, was her first encounter with the infamous bureaucracy of the DMV. If you’ve ever spent hours in one of those offices, you know: nothing about it feels fair. Not the lines, not the paperwork, not the process.

Riley had prepared everything she thought she needed. But when it came time to present her transcript, the DMV rejected it. The format her school used wasn’t acceptable, even though there was no public documentation of this requirement. We tried alternative forms of proof, but none of them were accepted. I even attempted a last-ditch email to her school director, hoping for a notarized letter in time, but with no luck. So, despite the triumph of passing the actual test, Riley left without her permit. She’ll have to return next week with the “right” form.

Was It Fair?

From my vantage point, sitting in a crowded DMV for hours, consoling a tearful daughter who felt somehow at fault, it didn’t feel fair. To the DMV staff, though, enforcing rules consistently across every case probably seemed fair enough.

On the ride home, I vented about the injustice of it all. But when I asked Riley what frustrated her most, she surprised me. She didn’t think the process was unfair. She just wished she had known the rules sooner.

That’s my little rule-follower (she gets that from her mother). She’ll eventually discover that not every rule is fair. But for now, she’s not cynical, just wiser for the experience. And maybe that’s a small win worth celebrating too.

SDW3