Parenting is all about acting and improvisation.
Kids do not come with instruction manuals or demo DVDs. And no matter how many parenting books are on your shelves, you’re going to come across something they don’t cover, or something that needs to be dealt with immediately, without giving you time to look to Dr. Spock for the answer.
For instance, what do you do when you’ve just moved into a new house and your two year old locks herself in the bathroom with God knows what? You haven’t finished unpacking and you certainly have no inventory of the items in the loo. There could be razor blades, Liquid Plumber, or Ex-Lax under the sink. What makes sense? When this happened to a friend of mine, she pleaded with her child to unlock the door, then gave up and kicked the door down. I am not making this up.
Discipline requires some quick thinking and creative solutions, and there’s nobody better at that than my husband’s cousin, Melissa. When her son (age 8 or so) ran upstairs in a fit of pique and locked her out of his bedroom, she promptly removed his doorknob, and then left if off. He endured approximately three months of his little sister and her friends peering through the hole in his door every time he retreated to his room, and I doubt he’ll ever try to lock his mother out again. If he does, she’s warned him that next time she’ll remove his entire door.
Her son is now 13, and this week he’s been leaving wet towels on the bathroom floor. Her solution? She’s given him only a hand towel to use for the rest of the week. Brilliant.
I suppose it’s only a matter of time until my children tell me they’re running away. How to respond? My grandmother offered to help my mother pack her suitcase when she threatened to leave home. That’s pretty good, and it stopped my mother cold. But the best I’ve heard is a friend who called her parents while they were out at a party to say she was running away. They said that was fine, but that if she was going to run away, she had to pack ALL her things, and that she and all her stuff had better be gone by the time they got back or they’d be really upset. What happened? She packed everything, and then found the suitcases too heavy to get past the front porch. She was squirreling boxes of stuff behind a tree to come back and get later when her parents pulled in the driveway. And yes, she got in a lot of trouble.
I’ve wished for Melissa’s creativity many times in the past three years. Unfortunately, I’m usually too tired, irritated, or just plain mad to come up with disciplinary solutions as creative as hers. So my mantra has become, “stay firm.” This means that what the twins get for a meal or a snack is what they get. Period. No short-order cooking or throwing away perfectly good food in this house. Predictably, this is not a popular policy.
Another mantra of mine is “explain things so thoroughly and so complexly as to distract and silence the children completely.” And hope they learn some vocabulary or valuable information along the way. For example, as I was wheeling my grocery cart through the frozen food section the other day, Grant and Anne spotted the Little Mermaids splashed all over boxes of cookies. Naturally, the cookies and the mermaids were strategically placed at child-in-cart level. I’m sure you can imagine what happened.
“Mommy! Look! A mermaid!” they chorused. “I want that,” Anne whined. “Please, oh please,” Grant begged.
Usually my response would have been a stern “No,” followed by getting the hell out of Dodge. But we were in a traffic jam, hemmed in by another double cart (with only one child in it), one older woman with a walker, and a couple of moms in chic workout clothes pushing carts full of organic food.
“Do you know why the Little Mermaid is on those boxes?” I asked. The kids continued to whine for the cookies but were clearly curious. “It’s called product placement. Disney owns the rights to ‘The Little Mermaid,’ and other companies know that people love the Little Mermaid, so they ask Disney to put her picture on things to help sell them. It works. See? You don’t want those because they’re organic granola cookies. You don’t even know what they are. You just want them because of the Little Mermaid. It’s brilliant, really. So then the companies who use her picture pay Disney a fee. Then they put those boxes down on the middle of the shelf so little kids like you will see them when their mommies stop to get eggs. They hope you’ll do exactly what you’re doing and beg your mommy for some of the cookies just because of the Little Mermaid, until your mommy gives in out of sheer frustration. Product placement, guys. Can you say ‘product placement’?”
By this point we’d cleared the traffic jam. I could hear at least one woman behind me busting a gut laughing, and my kids were saying, “pwoduct pwacmen.” Success.
I use this tactic a lot in the grocery store. One of the kids will beg for something completely random, like a pineapple. I’ll say, “No, we can’t get that. It’s not on the list!”
“But Mommy, I waaaaant it!”
“Well, we can’t get it, it’s not on the list. Do you know why we have a list? A list is very important. It helps you be organized. You plan out your meals for the week and then you make a list of ingredients you need to make those meals. That’s a cool word, isn’t it? ‘Ingredients.’ Can you say that?” By now they’re usually staring at me in stony silence. “So you make a list of all the ingredients you’ll need to make meals, because you don’t want to have to come back to the store, do you? It’s very important that you stick to your list, because if you start buying things that are not on the list, you’ll end up with a bunch of things you don’t really need that might be good but don’t go together to make up any meal. Then you don’t ever use them and they go bad and you’ve wasted money, which is a very bad thing to do, because Daddy works very hard to make money. So you have to make a list and stick to it.”
By the time my monologue ends, we’re usually well away from the offending food. I’m aware that this provides either endless entertainment or irritation for fellow shoppers, but I figure it’s better than listening to the kids’ screams echoing around the supermarket.
Another tactic I love is reverse psychology. If my kids throw a tantrum and refuse to follow me in a public place, I’ve adopted my mother’s approach. I say, “Ok, you stay here. We’ll see you later!” and proceed to walk away. It works every time.
When they don’t like the pajamas we’ve put out for bed, we say, “Ok, fine. We’ll put them on the dog.” Usually the mere threat works to send them running back to the room to get dressed, but recently Mark, when dealing with an unusually petulant Anne, actually had to put her pajamas on the dog before she came running back. The dog was not amused, and neither was Anne.
Next time I’ll try to get pictures.
Every day is different with kids. It's definitely amusing to say the least. Thanks for stopping by on my special SITS day.
LOL!!! So funny Angie!!
When my kids used to say “I want that,” sometimes I would say, “Oh, wow, that is really cool. I can see why you'd like that. You have very good taste.” Sometimes, it was enough for them to know that they were heard, and if they asked if we could get it, I would ruefully reply that I didn't bring money for that today.
I loved reading the your stories of creative mothering!
I've got the reverse psychology down but the whole logical theory explanation in the middle of the grocery store is sheer brilliance!!
I tend to pull the “smart ass parenting” kind of techniques. Like when they say “I want those cookies”, I respond with, “And I want smaller boobs…doesn't mean we're both gonna get what we want”.
I like your technique better.
Thanks for adding me to your blogroll! I'll add you to mine!
Helene, I use the “smart ass parenting” techniques, too. Big time. But I've tried to reign it in for public situations, as people tend to look at me like I'm crazy for considering sarcasm to be a valid parenting technique. Hence, the logical theory/bore them to death and hope they learn some vocab along the way.
So excited to be on your blogroll! Thanks!
Hi and thanks for the time, energy and love required to do something like this. I know, because I started a blog in March (www.toulouseandtonic.com) and do it purely for the love of writing. And maybe a little bit because I'm a stay-at-home mom who has no other contact with the outside world.
I think our tones are similar in their irreverence…and thanks to you and all the other voices who are finally standing up and saying, “I am NOT a perfect mother, but I'm still a good one.”