How Can You Have any Pudding…

That Miami, my cherished hometown, has only two seasons is well known. “Construction and hurricane” rather than the traditional four enumerated in the James Taylor song is what we have in South Florida and I’m used to it after almost 60 examples of each. What the tourist brochures neglect to mention is that with the advent of summer come swarms of mosquitoes in numbers that can only be described as Biblical. Having recently spent a few minutes swatting, slapping, scratching, fidgeting, cursing, lighting citronella candles, spraying carcinogens all over my body and–don’t try this at home–putting on thick wool socks to dissuade the ravenous beasties, I was still covered in bug bites the size of Brazil. Discretion being the better part of valor, I finally listened to my imminently sensible wife who suggested that I consider coming inside the house.

What a concept.

All that slapping, whacking, and scratching to no discernible purpose when all I needed to do was walk a few steps to casa firma.

Trying to extinguish the multitude of behaviors we don’t like in our children is similar to trying to smack each and every one of the hoard of blood sucking creepy-crawlies in South Florida. Yes, the whining and demanding of children at many ages could cause a loving parent to want to put her foot through a stained glass window*. But if your life resembles an unrelenting series of “put that down,” “don’t do that,” and “how many times do I have to tell you?” then maybe it’s time to take a step back. I’m not suggesting that your advice to your children is incorrect–I am the first to agree that a cat does not belong on a ceiling fan–only that you might want to consider the age old parenting adage: “pick ’em.” Because some of what you’re fighting for is likely not worth dying over.

I invite you to consider some of the bad advice you received from adults when you were a kid. Think of the BAD advice, the thoroughly discredited advice, the unequivocally disproven advice, the blatantly S-T-O-O-P-I-D advice with which you grew up and which you miraculously managed to get beyond (for the most part anyway.) After painstaking research including thinking about picking up the phone and actually calling another human being for help, I was able to come up with the following egregious example:

We had a family friend growing up who insisted that we finish all the food on our plates before we could drink any fluids. This mom’s “thinking,” such as it was, involved a convoluted tribute to “children starving in Europe” and an 18^th century conceptualization of human digestion. The thought that elementary aged children could determine on their own whether or not they were thirsty would have been denounced in favor of an assertion that “children should be seen and not fed.”

In all seriousness, even as a child, I detected an agenda of power and control.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that if your child’s emotional needs are being met, it is less likely that he will devote his life to making yours miserable. If you and your son are going for a walk with the dog, talking about nothing, and throwing rocks at that tree over there in the empty lot, there is less chance that said child will have enough time to find a way to put the words “duct tape,” “cat,” and “ceiling fan” in the same sentence.

How does a life become an unending series of “load the dishwasher,” “do your homework,” and “why don’t I ever hear from you?” Don’t get me wrong. I am in favor of all these behaviors: I voted for the “take out the trash” candidate in 2014; I supported the “A in algebra” platform in 2012, and will donate money to the “my child should call me more frequently” nominee in 2016.

I just wonder how it all got so crazy. I have to believe that in a loving family where “everybody works, everybody eats” and where we all enjoy just being with one another and where we value each other even if some of us don’t have an A in algebra, there might exist children who WANT to help out because they actually CARE about the larger people who live down the hall.

Especially if those said larger people are perceived as being on the same team, a team that enjoys hanging out together, taking walks, and talking about nothing. If the people on that team have read Winnie the Pooh and The Forgotten Door together rather than forcing one another to eat eggs over easy before allowing them to have a sip of milk, there might be fewer duct taped felines spinning overhead.

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* This metaphor is an homage to Raymond Chandler who used it to greater advantage in describing the effect of an attractive woman on a Bishop.