MoikP wrote:
He gets his taxpayer-funded MacBook through his public high school and it's insured, so he doesn't seem to care if he destroys it.
That's the root cause of the problem.
People only value something if they have to work or spend personal effort towards earning it.
It's the school's fault for giving a 15 year old a expensive portable computer in the first place instead of letting them use more durable desktop models in the classroom.
The school's mentality is unfortunately part of the socialist ideal where they think government and thus taxpayers should be supplying everything thinking it's a endless fountain of money. It's why when one now works a job there is little money left on the tab for other necessities as the government has decided to take first to give to kids to destroy at will.
Insurance is no fountain of money neither, as soon as a claim is made they charge more the next time around to make up for it on top of their operating expenses.
The only outcome I see here is the kid will destroy the machine and eventually the school will not provide another which the kid will complain to you that they need a computer for class.
I then suggest you make them earn it, in fact you should be starting that now so they build up a stored allowance which will go towards a new machine and assign them more work to pay it off when they get the new machine. Don't excuse the debt neither, even though it might seem like less work for you, the kid needs to learn the value of things and some things are not treated in a disposable manner.
You can't verbalize this with them, they have to actually learn it through personal experience, in which the conditions you control to arrive at the desired outcome.