Restating the obvious

When discussing my parenting strategy with people, I'll use the idea of ballistics. No, not temper tantrums or seeing how far my children can jump off a roof.

I mean that I have MAYBE 10 years to train these hairless ape-like female versions of me to have better behavior than I did at their age. After that point they will follow the trajectory given them with variance given to circumstance. This is similar to artillery where you take into account wind direction, rain, swarms of insects and the distance the moon is from the earth at that given moment.

2 days ago I was enforcing good eating on my 7.5 year old daughter. I was making her eat her bread crusts. I played to her strengths:

"You have a gigantic brain in that skull. Use it to convince yourself that you LIKE crusts, not the other way around. I don't give you bad food to eat. This just has a different texture."

She remarkably took the logic and began to choke back the crusts. I was impressed at the lack of whining she was doing.

I have found that my absolute intolerance of that dreadful noise has caused it to become like the fridge light. They stop whining when I'm around because I say helpful things like "Honey call the ambulance, I think one of the children punctured a lung" or "Crap, the cat has caught her tail in the vacuum!". I expect that whenever I am not home they use that noise as their sole means of communication.

So I left the room to do Daddy business. When I returned drying my hands 2.75 minutes later I found a clean plate being brought to the counter by a little girl. I said "I'm so proud of you honey! See, it wasn't that bad."

Now she put her plate on the counter, turned with a look of a mild appendix attack and came back to the table. She lifted one edge of her place mat and pulled out the bread crust. Then she looked at me and said:

"I was just hiding it there in case someone came along to take it."

I was a bit embarrassed for missing the lumpy place mat. I was ashamed that my older daughter had the opinion that I would go for that line. I couldn't think of a way to discipline her. She looked truly sorry. Still it is important that you follow through, so I said:

"Honey, Doctors tell us that inhaling smoke is bad for you no matter what orifice it is."

I watched her eat the rest of the crust. Entering the next room my wife said "What did you just say to her?!" I'm smart enough to know her rhetorical from her blond voice and replied "She didn't know what I said".

So when my children leave my house they will hopefully be well behaved, considerate, good, healthy people who know how to restate idioms with fantastic vocabulary. If that tactic doesn't work I'll train them to hide things better and lie convincingly.