Does the name Miya Ponsetto ring a bell? A few weeks ago Miya was all over the news and I was captivated…but not in a good way. Her entitlement and lack of ownership for her behavior intrigued me. I kept following the news stories and watched an interview she gave shortly after the incident thinking – This is exactly why I blog. I want to help teach people how to avoid raising an entitled child. I want to help them Raise Accountable Children!
If you are not familiar with the story that drew headlines, Miya is a 22-year-old woman from California who assaulted a 14-year-old boy whom she accused of stealing her phone while she was visiting family in New York. Miya tackled the boy from behind as he was walking away from her in a hotel lobby. The boy was with his father at the time and his father videotaped the incident. He and his son refuted her accusation immediately but Miya, nonetheless, stated she did not want his son to leave the hotel because she was certain he had her phone, despite any evidence to the contrary. Miya’s phone ended up being returned shortly after the altercation by the Uber driver whose car she left it in.
This story was politicized and even more concerning in nature because of the speculation that her accusation, and subsequent attack on the boy, was racially motivated. Initially, writing about this story felt like too much of a departure from my regular posts so I thought it best not to. However, as more news continued to come out about Miya and her entitlement, I was more convinced than ever that her conduct illustrates exactly what I want my website to be about, which is that accountability and “owning it” matters! Miya failed miserably by not holding herself accountable (which is very much “on brand”) and the reason I decided to share my opinion about her story after all.
Miya represents so many people in our society today. Adults who make bad choices but rather than acknowledging them they try, instead, to avoid the truth and its consequences. At some point these same adults were children with opportunities to be taught and while I have no idea about Miya’s upbringing, I would suspect that accountability was not commonplace. Why would I feel comfortable enough to speculate about someone I have never met? Because anyone experienced with being accountable from a young age (or ever) would not have responded as she did. Her haste when she realized her phone was missing is one thing but her continued denial and presumption which continued after the fact is entirely another.
Miya doubled down on her lack of accountability and entitlement by refusing to pull over when police attempted to stop and arrest her several days later while she was driving home and then again when she refused law enforcements request to get out of her car in her driveway. You can imagine the accumulative nature of her actions at this point. There are significant legal, financial, and social/emotional implications, all due to her choices when sadly that did not have to be the case.
When asked in the interview about her conduct towards the boy, Miya said she was sorry if the boy and his father’s feelings were hurt. Hurt feelings?! She assaulted the son. That is well beyond hurt feelings. Miya was in denial. She needed to first admit to herself that she assaulted a minor boy whom she wrongly accused of stealing her phone and then she needed to say it to the boy and his father, along with a genuine apology and an offering of restitution. That is how she could have owned it. Instead, like so many others Miya chose to:
…which is the reason she is in the position she is today and why we must do a better job of raising children to be accountable. (So they don’t grow up to be entitled adults.) Lack of accountability makes problems bigger than they would be if you just own it from the get-go, and makes fixing those same problems more difficult than it needs to be.
Had Miya had the emotional and/or intellectual integrity to acknowledge what she did wrong (which one would think easier to do given it was recorded on the father’s phone and the hotel security tapes) then she would have been able to start identifying whom or what she damaged, and begun the process of healing those she negatively affected (including herself) through a authentic attempt at some sort of redemption.
We all make mistakes in the heat of the moment. It is how we handle them after that matters most. So How to avoid raising an entitled child is by practicing and modeling accountability. If you do it, they will too!
