by Jim Lindberg
When you have a kid over to your house for a play date you are responsible for someone else’s pride and joy. Full disclosure to their parents of everything that went on when they come to pick them up is mandatory because you don’t want a situation where the kid says something confusing to their parents that makes you look bad. One time my oldest daughter had a friend over for the night and I was in our bedroom watching The Sopranos. When they eventually burst into the room, I told them the show I was watching was only for adults. The girl went home and told her parents that while they played I was in my room watching adult films.
GIMME, GIMME, GIMME
So your buddy comes over and wants to borrow your limited-edition, import, green vinyl Misfits Walk Among Us album and you immediately start cataloging in your mind all the things he’s borrowed over the years and traded for pot money or given back to you in an extremely altered condition, usually involving cat urine stains of some kind. You make up an excuse saying that your little sister wanted to borrow it for a science project about the resiliency of plastic mediums, but he knows you’re full of shit and doesn’t invite you to his next party for being a selfish a-hole and not parting with your precious Misfits import, you materialistic pig!
Imagine, then, if you are two years old and you have a Floppy Moppy doll you’ve slept with every night, drooled on, wiped your tears and nose with, cuddled against when you were scared or lonely, dragged around the house, and even slapped and beat in some bizarre acting out of a fight your parents once had. Then one day your mom brings a friend over who drops her little brat in front of you who’s wearing a helmet to reshape his head and has bubbly green snot pouring out his nose. He sees you clutching your one true prized possession and could care less about your shiny new fire engine or Hot Wheels track; he wants Floppy Moppy now! He tries to grab it from you, and when you recoil in horror, he flops back on the ground and throws a violent, convincing tantrum. Your mom rips Floppy from your clutches, hands it to Helmet Boy, points a finger at you, and says, “You need to learn how to ‘share.’”
Kids hate sharing and so do we. They will readily share anything they don’t care about: green beans, old socks, toys they’ve already played with a million times, but when it comes to things they really love or want to keep for themselves, being forced to hand it over to someone else seems like the ultimate betrayal. “Wait a minute. You gave birth to me, you clothe and feed me and put a roof over my head, but the first little moron that comes in off the street you hand over my Floppy Moppy? The betrayal! What kind of freakish Jekyll and Hyde parent are you?” Whenever I force my kids to share they look at me like I’m asking them to cut off a limb. Sharing is overrated in my book. It rarely works before the age of two or three, and after that, it’s only done grudgingly. Kids know that sharing sucks and they make no secret of hating it. In fact, my kids love to gloat and flaunt in their siblings’ faces the stick of gum or new toy they got that they don’t have to share with them. So when I tell them they have to share it feels like I’m asking them to pull out all their teeth. It doesn’t really seem fair. In fact, to them, it’s extremely terrible.
I can’t tell you how many times I scoured the F.A.O. Schwartz store in New York or the Toys “R” Us in Torrance searching for the perfect birthday toy for each child, or ducked into the candy store at Disneyland to get one of those huge spiral suckers that are bigger than your head, or stayed up late putting together a dolly baby stroller that was harder to assemble than a real one, and then present these hard-won riches to my children hoping for the abundant praise I so heartily deserved, only to have them reject the gift because they like what their sister got better. “Well, can’t you two share?” I say meekly. Then the tears come. “How could you give her the exact thing that I wanted?” is what each heavy tear says. “Do you love her that much more?” Expecting effusive joy and thanks for my hard work, instead, I’m a heartless traitor. This is some of the hair-pulling-out frustration I spoke of earlier, and to deal with it I usually just throw my hands in the air, mumble that I can’t win, and go in the garage and play angry Black Flag songs for about an hour.
This brings up another point. There is very little middle ground for kids. Either you’re the greatest dad ever, hero of the world, can-do-no-wrong father of the decade, or you are the most loathsome, detestable let-down of a dad that’s every darkened the corners of a playroom, and you can ping-pong back and forth between these extremes within a single conversation. There have been thousands of episodes in our parenting experience where I thought I was doing a great job only to find in their eyes that I couldn’t have betrayed their trust more deviously if I had thrown all their favorite toys in a tree shredder.
Kids know that sharing sucks and they make no secret of hating it. When you’re home alone the siblings know what’s theirs and what isn’t, but bring friends or neighbor kids into the equation and things get fuzzy. Their friends aren’t going to sit there with nothing to play with, but which ones are your kids willing to share and which will they guard like the Holy Grail? It’s hard to tell, but if you can’t figure it out, the conflicts of sharing can make the best friendships go south, because the kids won’t be able to get along, or worse, they’ll start beating each other over the head with their Tonka trucks.
To help avoid embarrassing situations and keep the peace, we started hiding the select few toys that we knew our kids would go ballistic over if some little turd cames over and so much as breathed in the same air space as their Buzz Lightyear action figure. We discussed in advance what they’re willing to share with friends and what needs to be locked away and hermetically sealed from play date invaders. Another more expensive option is buying two of the same toys for siblings who you know may be extremely jealous if one gets the Life-size Barbie and the other doesn’t, which was how our Christmas was ruined one year. Even with all your advance work, there will still be times when you will have a huge sharing issue at some birthday party and you’ll probably have to drag your kid screaming out of the house and all your friends will think you’re a terrible parent so go ahead and start planning for that now.
RULES MADE UP BY YOU!
“My daughter doesn’t seem to feel that same need to rebel the way I did. She does well with whatever rules are applied to her. I think my son is gonna be the one who has problems there. At least with the rules we set around the house, he’s not too good with following them. With my daughter it wasn’t such a big deal because we never had to set many rules for her, but with my son he’ll be the one with the hard time following authority.”
Noodles—The Offspring
Kids misbehave. Sometimes because they want something so badly they’re willing to risk punishment and bodily injury to get it. Kids don’t just want things, they “reeeeaaallllyyy, reeeeallllyyy, please Dad, pleeeeeaaase Dad, I’ll do aaaaaanything” want things. Other times they are just so spastically full of energy and impulsive they can’t help themselves from kicking a soccer ball as hard as they can in the dining room. They have a hair-trigger time period between thinking of something naughty and fun to do and then realizing it’s not a good idea. If you can’t somehow get in between that split second of them coming up with the idea of writing “Daddy is a butt-head” in ink-pen on the living room wall, and them carrying out their plan, there will be nothing to stop them.
Growing up punk and disorderly, I don’t have a hard time remembering how easy it was to get into trouble, but now I’m in the odd position of having to teach my kids how to behave so I’m not constantly having to go down to the principal’s office to bail them out. There are thousands of books, and now even TV shows, on how to discipline and deal with unruly kids, each one of them championing their own self-righteous, foolproof techniques on how to whip a strong-willed, impulsive kid into shape, with all kinds of cute catch phrases and admonitions for you to take charge of the situation and not let your three-year-old control you, like this is the easiest thing in the world, if you just follow their patented three-step plan.
For all the seminars I’ve been to on the subject, and all the TV shows and books I’ve seen and read, none of them have ever given me any real, definitive, concrete instructions on what to do when your kid is having a total conniption fit in the middle of a Wal-Mart, or going completely postal on you at the tot lot. They all deal with it in this vague, esoteric way, explaining that you need to show your child who’s boss and administer positive discipline, and tell the child that it’s not them but their behavior you don’t like, but how does telling them this stop your four-year-old from yanking two fistfuls of hair out of the girl’s head who just sat on his favorite swing at the park? Trust me, it doesn’t. They’ll look at you and say, “I’m glad you love me so much, now I’m going to drag this little girl over to the merry-go-round by her ponytails.”
One of the great things about punk rock was that there weren’t any rules on how it should be done. You were supposed to be able to dress, act, and play music any way you wanted, that was the beauty of it. Unfortunately it wasn’t long before some punker-than-thou keepers of the flame started trying to define exactly what was, and wasn’t punk, according to their own self-righteous criteria. Rules tell you what to do, and no self-respecting punk rocker likes to be told what to do. It’s the same with parenting. Most of the rules from parenting guides on how to deal with unruly kids are so black and white they don’t make room for shades of gray, and since every child is different, how could any one rule apply to everyone? Instead, there are principles. Principles describe basic ways of doing things that have worked in the past, and let you bend them for your own particular circumstances. From our experiences, nothing works all the time, but there are some concepts we’ve adopted that at least give the appearance that we know what we’re doing.
I believe the most important principle to remember in being a parent and managing an unruly kid is first trying to lead by example. Kids usually mimic the mannerisms of their parents, so if you don’t want your kid putting his feet up on the table and burping out the alphabet at dinnertime, don’t do it yourself. If you don’t care, go ahead. With a mouthful of barely chewed meat loaf and mashed potatoes, I’ll complain to my wife that our kids have absolutely no table manners. Kids look to you on how to act in public. If you say “please” and “thank you” a lot, so will they. If you fart in church and pick your nose in public, they will too.
Probably the easiest way to demonstrate this is with cursing. This is a tough area for people from the punk scene because we’ve elevated swearing to an art form, using crass expletives when they are totally unnecessary or when we’ve just completely run out of things to say. Sometimes I’ll be on the phone and won’t even notice them coming out of my mouth, or that my kids are listening in for future vocabulary reference. It got so bad that a neighbor brought our kid back from a play date saying my darling daughter had asked their child where the “fucking” ball went. I knew it had gone too far when the same daughter was putting her doll to sleep and said, “Night, night, my little fucker.” I started watching the words I used so my kid didn’t tell her teacher where she could shove her homework assignment, although it would be funny.
Another important principle we’ve discovered the hard way is putting in the advance work to head off a bad situation. Once my wife and I took the four-and six-year-old to the House of Pancakes for the first time, and on the way I was telling them what a great place IHOP was, and that they could get the Mickey Mouse pancakes with the raisin eyes and the whipped cream smile and the cherry nose and everything. When we were finally seated, the kids were so excited that they were bouncing off the walls, screaming and knocking things over like a couple of raging chimpanzees in heat. After ten minutes of this, the people in the booth next to us got up and moved to another table and our waitress gave us a dirty look and everyone in the entire restaurant started to stare at Jennifer and me and shake their heads. I scooped both the girls up, took them out into the parking lot, and started yelling at them for making us look bad. I threatened to confiscate their Barbie dolls and keep them as hostages until they learned how to behave and spouted other forms of mental child abuse and basically became psycho dad in the parking lot until they finally settled down and agreed to act civilized. By this point, however, our trip to IHOP had been ruined, and we went home. I didn’t realize until I was driving away that it was completely my fault.
I had been so busy building up the trip to the pancake house and telling them how much fun it was going to be that I forgot to do the advance work and set boundaries and consequences before we entered the premises. I should have explained to them that there are still certain rules of behavior in restaurants that don’t have giant cheesy rats as mascots, and that they would have to remember their manners and respect the other customers by keeping their voices down if they wanted to sample the culinary delights of a sophisticated place like IHOP. If I had prepared them in advance I wouldn’t have needed to go postal in the parking lot and missed out on a blueberry short stack myself. If I’d set the limits beforehand, we would have had a great time and they would have respected my authority, but instead I told them what a great time they were going to have, then yelled at them when they tried to. I suck!
In almost every situation where our kids misbehave, I can probably think back and realize that if I would have just given them some advice on how to act beforehand, we could have avoided a bad situation. Now I try to tell them how they’ll be expected to behave in a given situation in advance so I don’t have to blame myself when they act like most kids do, which is totally unhinged and out of control. If you give them a little heads up on what will be expected of them when they go to school, or out to dinner, or on a play date, it might help avoid a lot of the trouble they will ingeniously and spontaneously think of getting into, and you won’t have to think up creative new ways to punish them for it.
To some extent I’ve tried to make it seem like I’m on my kids’ side and that the consequences of their bad behavior will result in me having to play the tough dad role and dole out punishment should they choose to continue down the path they’re on when they’re acting up. Some parenting wizard will probably be able to find a problem with this approach, but for now, it works for me. For example, I’ll say, “If I was you, I’d be on your best behavior tonight out at dinner and not fight with each other, because if you use your manners and act nice, we might be able to stop and get some ice cream afterward. If you don’t, we’ll have to leave and you won’t get anything.” This way I’m coaching them on how to do the right thing so this third person—“authoritative dad”—won’t have to come out. I’m looking out for their best interests, and, of course, my own. Having a peaceful dinner is better than the alternative and the ice cream afterward was my idea in the first place.
Some experts criticize the reward-for-good-behavior technique, but what do they know? Experts are experts at having theories no one can prove. I think rewarding good behavior sets them up for a time in their life when they’ll have to show up at work every day and act civil and work hard to get their paycheck, and if they act lazy and disobedient they’ll get fired. There’s not a much better life lesson than that. Obviously, you don’t want to get to a point where you’re training your kid like a circus seal, holding sardines over their head to get them to do what you want, but by letting them know that if they resist the impulse to act like a little spaz and can control their behavior in certain situations they might get compensated in some way, they’ll have more incentive to do so. Conversely, if they know there could be a sharp penalty for misbehavior, they’ll probably be less inclined to engage in the types of activities that give me a major headache.
TIME-OUTS
Even with positive discipline and rewards and praise for the times when they don’t freak out and embarrass you at a restaurant, sometimes the temptation to misbehave is too great for some kids. Who am I kidding? Sometimes it’s too much for forty-year-old dads as well. Although it sounds easier than it is, the only acceptable mea
ns of disciplining your kids these days is by giving a “time-out” or by taking away privileges. I know in the old days our dads just used their belts on us, but nowadays the lightest spanking could get you sent up the river on child abuse charges.
Time-outs involve taking your kid to a prearranged spot for a prearranged amount of time to let them chill out and collect themselves when they’re behaving in a way that’s unacceptable. This spot shouldn’t be their bedroom because being sent to the place where they keep all their toys isn’t much punishment. Once the time-out is over we have a brief conversation with them and explain why they were given the time-out, what type of behavior we expect of them and what behavior will get them put right back sitting next to the cat box. Taking away privileges obviously means not letting them do something they enjoy doing, like watching TV, riding their bike, or chewing gum, anything they get enjoyment out of and will be bummed out that they won’t get to do. It won’t help if the privilege you take away is something vague or indeterminate, like threatening to take away their right to vote or use the bathroom. It has to be something they will sorely miss, like a video game or their favorite shoes.
We’ve also found that it’s incredibly important to be consistent and present a united front. If we threaten a time-out or a taking away of privileges but then one of us fails to follow through, our kids will only try to get away with it that much harder the next time. It has to be a foregone conclusion in their mind and ours that the prewarned discipline for misbehavior will be carried out no matter how many tears, curses, and boo-boo lips it causes or it loses all its power. If we’re not consistent and follow through when we threaten to take away Christmas, they think they can get away with anything.