The greatest skill of parenting has absolutely nothing to do with the overall mental or physical health of your children, of which my wife and I have three – or is it 30? It feels like we’re running a daycare with a waitlist.
Sure, trivial things like nutrition and the wherewithal to flush a toilet are valuable in the game of life, but what we’ve discovered, at least in our home, is that children will eat when they’re hungry, and the only toilets they’ll flush appear in public venues and have radar sensors.
No, the greatest skill set of parenting, we’ve learned, is fine-tuning an impenetrable series of threats designed to entice, yet mortally frighten, our children into Emily Post-type behavior.
“You eat three more bites of that broccoli, or we’re going to plant you in a garden for a week.”
“If you don’t brush your teeth, the Tooth Fairy will bring pliers and take two molars with her next time.”
“These LEGOs better be picked up in five minutes, or we’re filing assault charges.”
You know, the normal kinds of parenting tricks.
Unlike most of you, raising your perfect broods, my wife and I haven’t quite figured out the right concoction of threats.
“I can live in a garden? The Tooth Fairy is coming?”
This doesn’t mean we’ve given up as parents, albeit we get closer every day. It just means Meghan and I have to maintain our stamina until the day after Thanksgiving of each year when radio stations begin playing “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” and we hire a miniature parent to feather around our home.
This may sound absolutely asinine, but consider the heartbreaking elation my wife and I felt the other night when we found our oldest son, Hank, 6, sitting at a table with pen and paper in hand whispering toward the ceiling. And to understand this moment of euphoria, you must first take a glimpse inside our daycare center.
Hank and his younger brother, Cal, 3, have become proficient in the art of catastrophe. It starts with their voices, which echo around our home like electrocuted Screech Owls. That’s just the warning cry.
Hank borrows a toy, Cal throws a meaningless – though determined – punch and our home instantly become a mound of trampled fire ants, with bites and stings and tiny legs churning every which way.
Meanwhile, our precious, now 1-year-old daughter Eleanor Bo, gets caught in the stampede, screaming as loud as her brothers, squealing as they stumble by, and clanging her xylophone-like a wannabe warrior.
I am not too proud to confess our home likely registers on both the decibel and Richter scales most nights of the week.
So you can imagine that Folger’s moment my wife and I shared earlier this week when we saw our oldest son – the ring leader of the fire ants – sitting at the dining room table, meekly addressing an 11-inch, crossed-eyed, mitten-wearing, malnourished Elf.
If you have children and you don’t own Elf on the Shelf, stop whatever it is you’re doing, including any and all surgeries, and get yourself to a store. And if you don’t know the powers of this cheap, though magical, doll, consider this:
Besides a few “Sight Words” Hank has learned to write at school, our son has never, once, attempted to write a complete sentence, as far as we know. We’ve been told they’re studying phonic in his kindergarten class, and we’ve begun to help him read short sentences, but we’ve seen the limited application and only when prompted with the aforementioned threats.
“If you don’t write your words, this pencil will turn into a fire-spitting dragon.”
“I get to have a dragon? Cool!”
So when we walked in the dining room and peered over Hank’s shoulder, you can only imagine the pride we felt when we learned our son, at the very least, tried to form a cognitive thought on paper.
“Can I please have a basgitbol. Can it be the queen? Ad ples have a pocemon shirt.”
Look, we never expected to raise Shakespeare in our home, especially with my proclivity for short sentences and wanting humor. But, by gosh, I’ve read Twitter accounts with less clarity.
The next morning, still proud of my son’s accomplishments, I realized something either incredibly harrowing or wonderfully simple. My wife and I have spent more than six years trying to teach our son a few simple lessons.
First, we ask him to sit quietly at the table, of which he has never done, especially when girded with the agitation of his younger brother.
Second, we have asked him to stay focused on whatever project we request at the moment – putting on underwear, brushing his hair, smiling for a picture, picking up skin-puncturing LEGOs. We can count on two fingers the number of times he has obeyed without prodding.
Third, we constantly ask him very basic questions about what he learned at school that day, what he ate for lunch, where he left his water bottle. We don’t even need fingers to count how many times he has those answers.
What this means, if I’m adding all the pieces correctly, is that we’ve spent more than 2,000 days attempting to teach our son some of the basic skills for surviving in this world and we’ve failed miserably. Yet in a single night, when a red and green felt-covered, squirmy doll escapes from its box and hangs from a chandelier, our son immediately sits quietly in his chair, says “Please” and “Thank You,” learns how to write, and ignores every thumping his little brother delivers.