by Jim Lindberg
FREEDOM OF CHOICE
When it comes to getting them to do things they don’t want to do, one thing that I’ve found works sometimes is giving them a choice so they can decide between two things you want them to do instead of just refusing to do anything. My two-year-old has a thing about shoes. She will only wear the ones she is in the mood for at a particular time and they’re usually the ones that are completely inappropriate for what she’s wearing on the rest of her body—the black shiny tap shoes with her pajamas or snow boots with her sundress—but most of the time she doesn’t want to wear any shoes at all. She can sense the times when we’re going to a nice place for dinner to choose when she wants to go barefoot, then starts to freak when I demand she wear something on her feet. Before she goes completely postal, I take her to the closet and give her a choice of which shoes to wear. “I like the pink Vans slip-ons with tiny skulls on them, but Mom likes the pink Doc Martens. Which ones do you want to wear?” Now that she has a little control over the situation she’s more likely to capitulate. Either that or she’ll refuse and I’ll have to get into a no-holds-barred wrestling match with a two-year-old as I try to strap her feet into a pair of sandals. One way or another she’ll be leaving the house with shoes on, I tell myself. It’s really degrading when I come to the car with a barefoot child who’s smiling like Alexander the Great after a fierce battle victory.
CHOOSING YOUR BATTLES
Here’s a scenario. You wake up in the morning and the kid won’t get dressed so you say, “Well then, we can’t go to the park,” and they freak out. You give them a choice of what to wear, and after a little while of moping around and kicking furniture, they let you dress them, and you go. When you get home they want to watch television, but you say, ‘no,’ they watched enough this morning, and they flop on the floor and start crying and kicking until something else gets their attention and they go play with that. Later on, you’re at the grocery store and they scream for a candy bar, but you say no because it will spoil their dinner. They have a total freak-out attack and you ignore them and leave the area. After dinner that night you say they can’t leave the table until they eat their peas, they refuse and sit there staring at the offending peas for close to an hour. After they eat them they ask if they can have a scoop of ice cream and watch a video, you say yes because you’ve said no so many times today, and they deserve a break, and you really don’t want another meltdown while you’re reading an old issue of Flipside. Then you tell them to brush their teeth, put on their pajamas, and go to bed and they have another total meltdown. Overall, you score the day 5–1, advantage: parents, not too bad.
The point of this is something called “Choosing Your Battles.” Kids are going to have freak-outs and temper tantrums all day in an effort to get what they want. If you give in every time, you’re screwed. The kid will run you and the household and you won’t have a life. If you’re too harsh and never let them have any fun they’ll eventually hate you and could come after you with a blunt object one day. Picking your battles lets you say no when you really need to for your best interests and theirs, and it establishes that you are in control in the relationship, but then letting them have a break every once in a while, like sharing a bag of peanut M&Ms with them, lets them know you can be cool sometimes as well.
Although I can pontificate on how consistency and presenting a united front is key in every situation, there have been times when we’ve been so inconsistent with our kids they probably wonder what parent is going to show up on a given day. Sometimes we are on top of our game, correcting the misbehavior, leading by example, and doling out fair, consistent punishments, but other times we’re so beat we just give up and let them do whatever the hell they want. This is why sometimes they behave like perfect angels, while others, they are totally out of control. They’re completely caught off guard when they start misbehaving and the disciplinarian parents show up and they get grounded for a week.
Some kids are just incredible challenges and no matter what you do, it’s just not going to be easy; in fact, raising them will probably include some type of prescription medication for you and eventual hard time in juvenile hall for them, while other kids will be a breeze. The truth is there’s only so much we can do. Do too much and you’ll have an extremely well-behaved robot kid who hates your guts; do too little and you’ll have a miniature Napoleon bully who won’t be prepared to accept responsibility for anything they do later in life. If I’ve done my part to try to be a good parent but they still steal the neighbor’s car and flip off the principal at school, there comes a point where you just have to throw up your arms and say, “Well, I did my best. It’s society’s problem now.”
5
ANARCHY IN THE PRE-K
One of my official duties as punk rock dad when I’m not cruising the aisles of record stores looking for rare copies of Stiff Little Fingers albums is that of family videographer. I have to make sure I capture every birthday blowing out of candles, every flour-covered face helping cook pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, every shining new bicycle or Barbie fun house being unwrapped on Christmas morning, and every multicolored egg being discovered hidden behind a tree on Easter, all in vivid digital detail. There has been weeping, cursing, and great gnashing of teeth for the multiple times I accidentally left the cap on the lens or ran out of tape or battery life and failed to document one of our cherished family memories on Super 8 video. My penance now is to be asked repeatedly before each new event if the lens cap is off, if the battery is charged, and if there is enough tape in the camera to capture each and every newly toothless smile and hopeful birthday wish for posterity.
Pre-K is the modern term for preschool and these days if your kid isn’t enrolled in one as soon as they can walk and talk, neighborhood watch monitors will accuse you of reckless child endangerment. My children were, of course, first in line, as my wife, like all the other mommies in the newly yuppified South Bay, intends for her children to have every advantage in life when it comes to education. While I think they’d do well to be allowed to play around a little unsupervised before they have to face fifteen straight years of teachers, detention, and backpacks filled with a hundred pounds of homework, I reserve judgment and agree to serve my role as occasional picker upper or dropper offer of our toddler and full-time video documentarian.
The last school function I was in charge of filming was the Halloween parade. I’d brought my trusty camcorder, checked the lens, battery, and tape, and stood outside the classroom with a couple of other equally disheveled-looking dads who either didn’t have a day job, were independently wealthy, or sold drugs while their wives made millions in real estate. Just inside the door to one of the classrooms, Batman was leaning out the door crying and looking for his mommy until a teacher dressed up like a Krispy Kreme donut came over and consoled him. Soon a bell rang and the playground in front of us was instantly covered by dozens of small costumed creatures who came pouring out of the classrooms and were bumping into each other because many of them couldn’t see through their sweaty plastic masks. For a moment there, the swirling spectacle of all the vivid colors, garish costumes, and general pandemonium threatened to give me a bad acid trip flashback. There were small, frilly Cinderellas, Snow Whites, and Sleeping Beauties wearing lighted tennis shoes, miniature boxy Sponge Bobs, and Ariel mermaids in outfits that seemed impossible to walk or sit down in, as well as diminutive Buzz Lightyears and brawny Supermen, various Draculas, army guys, assorted monsters wearing masks with eyeballs hanging down their face, and plenty of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, even though this particular show had fallen out of favor among most kids years ago.
At one point someone blew a whistle and everyone was told to line up by class and soon all the three-foot creatures were bumping into one another and jostling for position in line and this was when my little fairy princess usually runs into problems. Daughter number two always has to be first, in everything. First to walk out the door, first into the car, first to use the bathroom, first in the s
nack line, first to do just about anything, but definitely first in line. She will bump, cross check, and body block anyone she has to if the position is open, and has been known to take out many children twice her size to gain her rightful spot at the head of the line. Although anticipating the whistle, she assumed her rightful position unchallenged, a Buzz Lightyear took exception when his spot just behind her was cut in front of by a Mutant Ninja Turtle and a small skirmish broke out. Unfortunately for little Buzz, the death ray laser beam he fired from his cuff link was little more than a battery-powered tiny red light-bulb, and before the teacher dressed as the wicked witch could intervene, the mutant turtle sent him to the blacktop with a fairly professionally delivered mutant ninja turtle spinning back kick. For some reason I watched the spectacle transfixed instead of filming it and lost out on an assured ten thousand dollar prize on America’s Funniest Home Videos.
Preschool class consists of a lot of storytelling, finger painting, marching in line to and from different places, and playing on the playground. It’s basically just school without much school-work. They learn about saying the Pledge of Allegiance (I tell my kids to defiantly raise a single fist in protest during the “Under God” part just to piss off the conservative parents in class) and also about how to sit still on a rug and listen to the teacher and not just run around the room the whole time like a crazy person. Without this small bit of practice, they can hardly be expected to know how to behave in kindergarten if they’ve been sitting home watching Sesame Street all day, although they’ll probably know the alphabet really well.
Every time one of our children started kindergarten there’s always one or two kids there who are scared to death, crying and freaking out because it was their first experience with being dropped off to hang out with a bunch of other kids all day with no mommy around to hold their hand. Daughter number one, being the sketchy child, wasn’t particularly thrilled about it, either, her first day, but after having spent two full years in preschool she knew what to expect somewhat and was able to handle it with only a few scenes of clinging to her mom’s leg.
I thought wild-woman daughter number two would bring home so many yellow and red cards from climbing walls and putting other kids in headlocks that I would have a full deck by the first month, but amazingly she instead brought home a few gold cards for good citizenship. Somehow a great preschool teacher and some quiet time on the carpet tamed the savage beast within her and taught her that she needed to maintain control in the classroom and save the spazzing out for the monkey bars during recess.
Daughter number two may be a little hellion at home because she feels comfortable enough to cut loose, but at school she feels the pressure to excel just like she does in sports. She wants to get good grades and not be embarrassed by being reprimanded in class all the time so she usually tries to be on her best behavior. She knows that it’s only at home she can get away with things like calling her dad a “butt munch” or throwing her food across the table.
The great part of this for the punk rock dad was that, when I wasn’t on tour, I could be home to drop off or pick up the kids at preschool and have a chance to be involved in their daily lives. There were more than a few times I found myself outside the classroom waiting for the kiddies to be dismissed, standing in a circle of moms trading stories about some funny thing their kids said, or gossiping about what a horrible parent that one mom was in Room Four, and who does she think she is taking up three spaces with her Hummer in an already crowded parking lot and I bet her nanny hates her. Then I snap out of it and think, “What the hell am I doing?” and grab my kid and run.
THE LAND OF COMPETITION
When the kids entered pre-K, I knew that this was the beginning of decades of interaction with other parents in the community, and I wasn’t surprised to find out that most of them weren’t raised listening to Black Flag and the Adolescents and sneaking into punk shows. Although 95 percent of the parents we deal with on a day-to-day basis are normal, nice, well-adjusted people, because the home prices in Southern California have nearly quadrupled in the last decade, some of the parents we rub elbows with at school functions and little league games are of a completely different social variety than the working families native to the area. The new breed of power parents are entertainment lawyers, dot-com moguls, and security bonds traders with three nannies, four gardeners, two on-call plastic surgeons, and no problem paying cash for a five-million-dollar McMansion overlooking the ocean.
Driving around our little hippie beach community in the 1960s, you would have seen peace-loving surfers with ARMS ARE FOR HUGGING stickers on the backs of their VW vans, with naturally tanned surfer girls riding next to them and dinged-up long boards strapped to the roof. Now you’ll find heavily Botoxed and silicon-enhanced soccer moms driving luxury SUVs with GPS satellite systems guiding them to the nearest Starbucks or tanning booth. Dad tools around in the latest Mercedes S-Class “I wish my d@#k was bigger” convertible coupe, and has his own personal trainer to help shape his microliposuctioned, hair-free abs. This is all so they can sleep well at night on their six-thousand thread count sheets, knowing they are not only keeping up with the Joneses, but thanks to their thousand-dollar-a-day personal trainer, they could thoroughly kick the Joneses’ asses.
I woke up early one morning last summer and decided to drive down to the beach and check the waves, and listen to an old Naked Raygun cassette tape I’d found that I used to play over and over when I was just out of college. I pulled out of my driveway and was slowly driving down our quiet residential street when I was nearly run off the road by a crazed woman coming around the corner taking her kids to a nearby school in a giant SUV. I swerved out of the way and she blasted her horn at me, yelled some profanities, flipped me off, and disappeared in a cloud of exhaust and large “RE-ELECT BUSH” and “AYSO SOCCER” stickers in her back window.
Many of these nouveau riche supercompetitive parents hyped up on gallons of triple nonfat lattes are completely crazed with the need to prove the genetic superiority of their little slice of heaven’s goodness against your evil spawn of Satan, and will treat this competition like a battle of biblical proportions. At our elementary school, and I swear to you this is not a lie, the mom’s start to camp out at one o’clock in the morning and spend the entire night shivering in line to get priority to sign their kids up for the best classes and best teachers. What’s this about? How can there be a bad teacher in kindergarten? Does one of them put acid in the finger paint? Is there one kindergarten teacher who’s out on parole, sitting alone in a classroom with her crayons because no one wants their kid to take her class? Is their some hidden network of mommies that sends e-mails to each other saying, “Don’t take Ms. Ryan’s class. She’s a known cannibal”?
Psycho soccer moms and dads are everywhere. From far away they may look like normal people in their $500 sunglasses and designer stressed jeans, but don’t let looks fool you. To them, raising children is the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and the Iditarod, all blended into one huge battle royale. They want their kid to win every event at any cost, and are willing to do almost anything to make sure they get every advantage in life, and trampling over your little youngster along the way may just have to be part of the price. This aberrant behavior comes from our animal instinct to protect and provide for the welfare of our offspring. The desire to perpetuate the survival of our gene pool is hardwired into our DNA, but some modern parents don’t realize we’re not on the African serengeti anymore, and they no longer have to eat the young of those who challenge their child’s position in the pecking order.
The other place the psycho parents show their true colors is on play dates and in social situations at school. They compulsively have to be involved in every small bit of social interaction in their children’s lives, suffocating everyone with their extreme butting-in to a point where you’ll wonder if they’re not out there on the playground throwing elbows for their kid in line for the monkey bars. They’ll be best friends with all the teach
ers and principals and can be seen chatting up the janitors and P.E. coaches between classes, hoping to win some influence for their child. They’ll volunteer to be the teacher’s assistant’s helper’s aide, cutting out paper hearts for the Valentine’s Day party and posing motionless for thirty-six straight hours in the manger for the Christmas pageant. They’ll build a life-size replica of a haunted house for the Halloween carnival, dye seventeen thousand eggs for the Easter parade, and on Martin Luther King Day, they’ll mime a dramatic reenactment of the assassination in real time. If need be, they’ll drive the school bus on field trips, resod the kickball field, and when there’s nothing left to do, they’ll just drive around and patrol the perimeter of the campus in their luxury minivans, listening to self-improvement tapes. In their bold, naked attempts to curry the smallest bit of favor for their richly deserving offspring, they’ll bring ass kissing and brown nosing to previously unheard of levels. You’ll want to puke.
PARENTING GROUPS
So I was pretty concerned with what I was getting into when my wife signed us up for the requisite parenting groups and mommy and me classes. I figured all the other parents would be of the psycho conservative variety and that I’d stand out as the lone punk rock dad in the room and have nothing in common with any of them. I was pissed off at first at having to go to all these get-togethers where you have to socialize with a bunch of people you don’t know and eat fancy finger foods and drink cocktails and wine instead of beer. For us dads, at first, much of the time was spent in a semicircle with about six other guys in Tommy Bahama shirts, discussing sports scores and playoff results, and a lot of the time you’re kind of shuffling back and forth looking at your shoes not knowing what to talk about and feeling uncomfortable. Then we have a couple more margaritas and everyone begins to loosen up a bit and we start trading stories about things we did in high school and then someone mentions they were at the same Ramones show I was in 1985 and I begin to realize that although some of them may have entered the corporate world and wear the uniform, like me they’re all still kids at heart in a grown-up world and like to get into trouble occasionally like we used to, it’s just that now the hangovers last a little longer and we all have kids who want to be played with on the weekends. After a while we start taking shots together, and before I know it I’m enjoying myself so much I’m pissed off when Jennifer says we have to leave.