Category: humor

Adventures in bad parenting: Giving a kid cash to stop whining

Editor18 Comments

I didn’t see this happen, and neither did Sweetie, but it concerns our youngest, the 4-year-old, Thing 2.

He was with his grandparents, and they don’t really want to talk about it, but here’s the story we’ve managed to piece together from the scraps of information we’ve been given:

Thing 2 is nearly 5, but he’s just now going through his terrible 2’s.

When he’s not happy, when he doesn’t get his way, he cries. If that doesn’t work, he wails. If that doesn’t work, he has what folks in the South call a conniption.

When we cave — and we usually do cave, especially in public — the crying stops, instantly, like you’re turning off a tap. Suddenly, he’s fine, and we feel like suckers, and rightly so.

We’re trying to break him of this habit, and I thought we were beginning to make progress.

So, Sweetie’s parents are in town, and they took Thing 2 to Kroger. He wanted something — I don’t know what, exactly — but they said no, and he started crying, and when that didn’t work, he started wailing, and when that didn’t work, he had a conniption.

Thing 2’s conniptions aren’t really angry, but they’re loud, and he sobs like you’ve just told him you’re taking his dog to live on a farm in the country. “Pleeeeease,” he’ll say between sobs. It can be heartbreaking, and it’s hard to say no, especially if you haven’t seen it a million times before.

When we’re with him and he does that, we take him outside and talk to him, or else one of us takes him to the car, but the grandparents were caught off guard, so I’m not blaming them for what happened next.

Thing 2 was causing such a disturbance in the checkout aisle that the cashier reached into her pocket and gave him a dollar bill. She gave him cash to make him stop crying.

And it worked. The crying stopped, instantly.

He used the money to buy a Hot Wheel, which he proudly showed me when I got home.

When I finally pieced together the story, I was speechless. How did it come to this?

I turned to Thing 2 and, trying hard to channel my inner Mr. Rogers, I said, “This is bad. Do you understand?”

He either didn’t understand or couldn’t have cared less. I changed my approach.

“I can’t believe a big boy like you were crying so much that the check-out lady gave you a dollar to stop crying. You’re almost 5. This is really bad. You know that, right?”

He smiled and nodded his head, like I’d said, “The sky’s blue. You know that, right?”

He said, “Oh, yeah,” and went back to playing with his new Hot Wheel, like he didn’t have a care in the world.

Sweetie and I have gotten used to reprogramming the kids after the grandparents visit. (I don’t know why, but grandparents cannot say “No.”)

But this? This episode established a dangerous new precedent.

This is going to take some work.

The 5 stages of trick-or-treaters

Editor14 Comments
Jack-o-latern
Image: Toby Ord, Wikipedia

Halloween falls on Sunday, which, of course, is church night, so some communities are having trick-or-treat tonight, Saturday, although I wouldn’t be surprised to get trick-or-treaters both nights, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some trick-or-treaters double dip.

When I was a kid in eastern Kentucky, we had 5 distinct stages of trick-or-treaters:

  1. The demons we knew. These were the kids of friends of the family. Mom would make special goodie bags for them — caramel popcorn balls and full-sized candy bars.
  2. The demons we kind of knew. These were random kids in the neighborhood. They got miniature Hershey bars. The kids in our neighborhood generally wore decent costumes (or at least a mask). They always said “Trick or treat!” and usually said, “Thank you!”
  3. The demons we didn’t know. We lived in a subdivision out in the country, so these little monsters were random kids from out in the country. They didn’t live in a neighborhood, so they’d hit several subdivisions and maybe go into town. They generally didn’t wear costumes, as such. They’d wear old clothes and smear lipstick or something on their faces. They looked like psychotic clowns. They usually came in groups, and at least some of them would say, “Trick or treat,” like that. Flat, with no enthusiasm. They might or might not say, “Thank you.”
  4. The demons we suspected were collecting candy for their obese moms waiting in the car. The fourth wave of kids would come near the end of trick-or-treat. If trick-or-treat was supposed to end at 8, they’d come at a quarter of. They usually didn’t wear costumes and rarely spoke. They didn’t have a special Halloween candy bag. They’d carry pillow cases, and when you opened the door, they’d just hold it out, joylessly. This wasn’t fun for them. This was a job.
  5. Teenagers. Some might wear masks, but most didn’t. They giggled like Beavis and Butt-head, like we were stupid, like we didn’t know they were too old to trick-or-treat. After the first group of teenagers, Dad would snuff out the candle in the jack-o-lantern and turn off the porch light — the international signal for saying, “We’re not playing anymore” — but we’d still get four or five more groups of teenagers. It was around this time of night that someone would put an M-80 or a cherry bomb in our jack-o-lantern and blow it up.

Things are different where we live now. The kids all wear costumes. They’re all polite. We get some double-dippers, but not many, although near quitting time, we still get a few teenagers. That’s when we turn out the light and call it a night.

I still bring in the pumpkin, though, just in case.

We’re a nation of klutzes

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Here’s my train of thought: I was reading the Codger’s blog the other day. He referred to a sofa as a “davenport,” and I remembered an alarming statistic I read a few years ago:

Over 130,000 Americans a year are injured by sofas, couches or davenports.

It’s in the 2006 edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States — and, yes, it specifically mentions davenports.

I’d looked up “Injuries Associated with Selected Consumer Products” after reading Bill Bryson’s book, I’m a Stranger Here Myself.

In the book, Bryson mentions flipping through the Statistical Abstract and being surprised to discover that, at the time, something like 400,000 Americans were being injured every year by beds, mattresses or pillows.

It seemed impossible that so many people couldn’t lie down without hurting themselves, so I looked up the statistics myself. That’s when I discovered that over 130,000 people a year also fail at sitting or lying on a sofa, couch or davenport.

We’re not talking minor injuries here. These are injuries serious enough to send the victim to the emergency room.

Every once in a while, something comes up like the Codger’s reference to davenports that reminds me of the Statistical Abstract and makes me wonder whether we’ve gotten any less klutzy.

We haven’t.

The 2010 edition of the Statistical Abstract came out a few weeks ago.

First of all, I was disappointed to discover that the U.S. government no longer tracks the number of people hurt by sofas, couches, or davenports (no doubt bowing to pressure from the powerful sofa, coach and davenport lobby).

Second, it turns out we’re doing an even worse job of lying down successfully than we did when Bryson’s book came out 11 years ago.

Back then, the number of bed- or bedding-related injuries was around 400,000 a year. Today, it’s 532,000.

That’s more than are hurt by household packaging and containers (205,000),  footware (155,000), and hammers (35,000) combined. (How do you hurt yourself with a household container, anyway?)

But wait. It gets worse. According to the Abstract:

  • 319,000 people a year are hurt by chairs
  • 305,000 injure themselves while trying to walk through doors
  • 60,000 are seriously wounded by TVs

I know. We’re a nation of 300 million. Sixty thousand people out of 300 million is a tiny fraction. It’s statistically insignificant, a rounding error.

Still, 60,000 people a year — people who probably are allowed to drive, people who vote — managed to get hurt by objects that sit there and don’t actually do anything.

It’s scary. Every time you leave the house, there’s a fair chance you’ll cross paths with someone who’s so clumsy he or she can’t even watch TV without getting hurt. It’s enough to make me want to stay in and lock the doors — if I didn’t think I might hurt myself in the process.