Conspiracy
August 27th, 2007
Dear Person Who Has Been Slipping My Children Behaviorist Theory,
Please stop! I don’t know who you are, but there is clear evidence that someone has, behind my back, been spoon-feeding the precocious darlings some B.F. Skinner. I expect any day, to be rifling through their backpacks and find a pamphlet “Training Your Parents in 10 Easy Steps” with beginner level steps like:
1. Wait for the moment when the parental unit is clearly relaxed and not thinking about you and choose that moment to torture your brother until he screams loud enough for the neighbors to surely contemplating calling Child Welfare.
2. Make it clear that the person who does most of the picking up in the house understands that the inevitable consequence of time spent with a computer is a bucket of really tiny lego pieces dumped in the kitchen.
3. Try getting up before your parents are awake and entertaining your little brother by flushing toys down the toilet, and then say “But we were playing quietly so you can sleep because I love you!”
4. The phone ringing is your bell for snack time.
5. If you behave atrociously enough at the grocery store, then your parents will find themselves willing to make catsup soup for dinner rather than take you shopping.
6. The sound of the vacuum cleaner is your cue to do science experiments in the bathroom sink. Clean-up in the bathroom is your cue to take crackers into the living room.
7. Sleep deprivation is your friend. Your parents will have neither judgement nor will power left when they are tired enough.
8. There is no reinforcement like intermittent reinforcement. So some days give your mother an hour of reading peacefully while you play sweetly with your brothers, and other days every time you see her glancing longingly at the book discover an “emergency”: scream about a bug only you can see, worry about volcanoes, lose your favorite toy dinosaur (bonus points for down the toilet) experiment with ways of pouring your own cereal, milk, and just for variety’s sake, try sweetening that cereal with maple syrup, making sure that it’s conspicuously all over the kitchen.
9. Make sure you reward behaviors you want to encourage, so every grudging concession to letting you watch tv or play video games that she swore would never enter her house should get her an hour of sanity-saving peace, quiet, and order.
10. If you slip and let her find the pamphlet, for all of our sake don’t let her have time to blog about it, because we surely don’t want word to spread. Remember, loose lips sink the Lego ships that you built with all of the coveted red bricks that your brother wanted.
See, I’ve been reduced to trying to write cutesy parenting humor, because every other serious thought I’ve had in the last three days has been interrupted by calls to referee who-started-its and the dread sentence, rising on a wail “But it was an ACCIDENT!” I know a sense of humor is the most important tool I have in parenting, but it feels like such a damn cliché, and it’s been done so much better already. But then, maybe I am just subject to forces much bigger than I am.
