Toddler Tales: An Older Dad Survives the Raising of Young Children in Modern America

by Lee B. Mulder

Dogs, kids, whatever. Her simple advice for instilling proper behavior is: be clear in your commands, reward them when they obey, be firm when they disobey and show them you love them.

  I was sure she was onto something... for kids, not just dogs... and vowed to put my son through obedience training.

  "Sit. Stay," I command at the dinner table to the young lad who thinks it's great fun to wriggle out of the booster chair and hide under the table during dinner. On hearing the command, he is in momentary shock and actually does sit and stay for a few seconds. Then he slips out of his chair and hides under the table.

  Referring to Wodehouse, she says, "If the puppy disobeys, you must issue a stern reminder that you are master. A swift rap on the rump with a rolled-up newspaper works for me." It didn't work so well for me. Meal times are tough.

  Perhaps if we put his food in a dish on the floor, then we wouldn't have to worry about his wriggling out of the chair. We could get a nice one with his name on it, and maybe put a straw in the matching water dish

  When we get out in the yard, I throw a stick. “Fetch, Harvey,” I command. He goes for it, but does not bring it back. Instead, he throws it too. "No, no, Harvey, you bring it here.

  He picks up the stick, brings it to me. "Good boy," I say and I pull a piece of chocolate chip cookie out of my pocket. He eats it, looking for more. "Now fetch," I say, throwing the stick across the yard. He giggles at the game and runs to get the stick. He brings it back. "Good boy," I say, and hand over another piece of cookie. This is great, I murmur. He gets it.

  On the third throw, he dawdles. "Come, Harvey." He looks at me, then my pocket, and meanders back with the stick. "Good boy. That's all for today. Go play." According to the book, once set free, he's supposed to go bounding off into the woods to chase chipmunks, but instead, he turns to me briefly and throws the stick. "Fesh," he says and then attacks my pocket looking for cookie bits.

  "No, no, no. Bad boy. No more numnums today. Go play." He shrugs and wanders off to find a truck and play in the dirt.

  Wodehouse says two of the most important things to teach a puppy are to heel and to stop on command. You don't necessarily need a training collar to achieve these levels of obedience in your dog, but they do get the idea a bit faster. A training collar is a metal necklace with blunt points bent in towards the neck. The collar is a little smaller around than the trainee's neck and is held together with a slip chain, which has a ring on it for attachment to the leash. Thus, every time the leash is yanked, the collar tightens and points dig into the neck. That way, if the wearer is lagging behind when he is supposed to be trotting smartly at his master's side, one yank on the chain with the reminder to "Heel!" brings him obediently into place. Sounds ideal for children.

  But, as I'm standing in the pet store, I wonder how wise it is to put my son on a collar and leash. The clerk asks, "How large a dog do you have?" I say, "Oh, it's not for my dog, it's for my son." She stares at me wide-eyed for a moment, then says, "Weeelll, you might have a little trouble getting this collar over his head." And then I understand the real reason people don't use these things on their kids. Unlike dogs, children's heads are much bigger around than their necks and you just can't get a slip chain collar to fit right... if it's big enough to go over the head, it will be too big to be effective on the neck. So, I decided, if I was going to train my child with a leash and collar, I would just have to settle for one of the standard, buckle-on devices with no training barbs on it. Like Wodehouse says, it'll take the trainee a little longer to get the idea, but it will come. I will have to be patient.

  Children on leashes and collars should be kept in one's own yard during daylight hours because there are lots of wierdo fanatics who think such treatment is abusive. But they just don't know how useful it is.

  Take, for example, teaching your child to come when you call. There is no better or faster way than to have the child on a long leash and command, "Come (child's name)!" and gently pull on the leash until he starts to walk toward you. When he arrives, give him a big hug, say "Good boy," a bit of cookie, and try it again. In less than a week, you can try it without the leash with a high probability of success. Now I ask you, is that abusive? Maybe teaching the child to heel is abusive... it's probably against a child's nature to walk smartly alongside his parent and sit down whenever the walking stops...

  I never did try that.

  Another useful part of obedience training involves the command "Stop." To practice this exercise, take your child out walking (at night, remember) with his collar and leash. When you come to a corner and he starts to walk across the street without looking, you yell, "Stop!" and yank back on the leash. When he's brought up short and his eyes start to bulge, you coo,

  "Good boy." Don't forget the positive reward every time. Eventually, he will remember to stop and look before crossing streets. Once off leash, if you see your child about to bolt wildly onto some thoroughfare, you will be amazed at how a well- timed command to "Stop!" will cause them to freeze in their tracks. Remember, the safety of your child is of paramount importance.

  One of the most difficult exercises for dogs, and certainly for children, is the long sit. This is where you command your child to sit in one place for ten minutes. They are required to ignore any distractions and stay put until you tell them to "Go play." This exercise is most successful when other children are involved and they all are required to do the "long sit." You can often entice other children into the training by making a game of it, such as calling it a picnic. It's a little devious, but these are devious times; once ingrained in their little brains, this skill comes in very handy for "time-outs", or long movies or leaving them on the sidewalk outside the grocery store while you shop.

  I must say that I've had nominal success with this method. The skin on my son's neck is much tougher now so the collar doesn't chafe. I did break down and buy him a collar with his name on it. He loves to go for walks. I know this because he brings his leash to me and then sits by the back door whimpering until we go out.

  I have noticed some side effects of obedience training that will probably work themselves out with time. When we go to the park, he loves to catch Frisbees in his teeth. He often has to jump very high to do this, but he is developing strong hind quarters and excellent eye-mouth coordination and it is quite impressive. He's good at it. But we do go through a lot of Frisbees as his teeth tear them to shreds.

  He has developed a preference for other dogs over other children in the neighborhood, probably because the other children aren't nearly as well behaved. As a highly social animal, he makes friends easily by offering to share his bite-size Milk Bones with them. He can tell one dog from another by smell, a skill I certainly never intended him to learn and one that's pretty disgusting to see in practice, but one which I'm sure will become valuable later in life in sizing up people, especially a mate.

  After a hard day roaming the neighborhood, he comes obediently home and jumps into the tub. He tells me about all the rabbits he chased, the holes he dug, and the tricks his pals played on the mail man. Once snug in his jammies, he crawls around his bed in a circle three times before settling under the covers for his favorite storybook: 101 Dalmations. And when I finally come in for my goodnight hug, he licks me affectionately on the ear.

  Good ol' Barbara Wodehouse. I just couldn't be a good dad without her.

  The Drum

  It was a Labor Day box from Grandma. How sweet. But how weird. Who gives gifts for Labor Day except Grandma and maybe the United Auto Workers? Whenever the plain brown carton comes to our house by UPS from Ohio, we let it sit in the foyer for a couple of days. I'm not sure why, there are always wonderful surprises inside. Little did we know that THIS box would change our lives forever.

  Now there is a rhythm to our house. It goes boom baba boom baba boom all around the upstairs and sometimes it comes downstairs too. It is a little boy with a tomtom given to him by loving neighbors after a cheap vacation out west. It is my little boy and I love him dearly,
but if he doesn't stop with the boom baba boom baba boom pretty soon, I'm gonna accidentally drive over the tomtom with the car.

  When you're contemplating the great life decision of children, somehow you never factor in the drum. What an innocent little thing, the drum. The little drummer boy plays his ratta-tat-tat at Christmas. The high school marching band strolls by to the cadence of the showy, melodious boooom of the big bass drum. And, when put into the hands of a Sandy Nelson, it is both a feat of human endurance and torrid music that stirs the soul. But put a tinny little snare drum into the hands of two year-old and you're buying a ticket to the nuthouse.

  A drum is what non-custodial ex-spouses send their shared children home with at Christmas. It's an instrument that requires a premium for lessons because they must be taken outside of the house and the instructor must listen to it. A drum in the hands of a child is the smart bomb of toys, a guaranteed direct hit on the adult psyche. Psychologists will tell you that a drum is also a way for the child, particularly a boy, to get in touch with himself... the primitive expression of a beating heart, shared with others in some kind of primal rite. Psychologists with small children of their own will also tell you that it's a