My husband and I are experimenting with a radical new parenting technique,
one that we call, “Keeping Our Mouths Shut.” I had heard of other parents
attempting this terrifying feat. Frankly, I never thought we would get this
desperate.
To non-parents, the idea of parenting simply by Keeping Our Mouths Shut may
sound absurdly easy. Why, any higher primate could do that, you might conclude.
But parents of real live kids (as opposed to parents of action figures or
Yorkshire terriers) realize that this form of silent parenting is a fallback
position, a sign that you have exhausted your parenting bag of tricks.
None of this would be necessary if children didn’t each come equipped with
something called a “personality.” The “personality,” as we have experienced it,
is guaranteed to be in mortal conflict with nearly every other personality in
the family. To remedy these conflicts, we have bought thousands of advice books
written by people who have never met our children but who presume to teach us
how to rear them anyway. If all goes well, children will grow up to be loving,
respectful, clear-thinking and moral individuals who will be a pride to their
community. If things don’t go so well, the kids surprise Mom and Dad when they
are fifteen by arriving home with nose rings that make them look like bulls.
Some of the wackier parenting tricks we’ve tried included everything from
putting beans in jars for kids to earn treats (great for the budding actuary in
the family) to the wimpy strategy of “reflecting kids’ feelings” back to them.
Reflecting our kids’ feelings back to them only yielded the humiliating result
of our kids cocking their heads to one side and asking, “Are you feeling all
right?”
Eventually we devised a plan we thought was simply genius: We would talk to
the kids as if they were intelligent, reasonable people who would respond to
logic! We started with straightforward examples, such as, “You may be right that
your math teacher has serious bad breath, but telling him may upset or embarrass
him. He might even lower your grade on the test.” In this case, logic could not
compete against the irresistible lure of sharing his observation with the
teacher. The teacher got back at our kid by somehow making his breath even worse
for the rest of the year.
By the time kids are teens, the parenting books have become large dust
magnets, destined for Good Will. This is when parents usually start to reminisce
like soppy Hallmark greeting cards about the good old days when their tykes were
small.
“Ah, remember when Molly walked into the living room with Great-Uncle
Morris’s dentures in her mouth? Or when Brandon nearly short-circuited the
neighborhood with those pliers?” The operative word in these misty-eyed stories
is “nearly,” since mischievous little ones are forever on the brink of
destruction and mayhem. But young children endearingly still believe that their
parents know more than they do – a condition they will outgrow as soon as the
braces are bonded onto their teeth. Parents of little kids don’t appreciate the
beauty of moments when they say, “Take the screwdriver out of the socket and
give it back to Mommy, Timmy, and you’ll get another cookie,” and – get this--
Timmy actually hands the screwdriver over to Mommy!
Perversely, kids stop listening to parents right smack at the time when they
are old enough to commit heart-stoppingly dangerous antics, such as driving,
dating, and starring in homemade, embarrassing movies about themselves that they
upload onto the Internet. This is when parents begin to appreciate the concept
of military boot camps, even for girls.
This all brings us to our latest parenting ploy of Keeping Our Mouths Shut.
Frankly, after issuing billions of words to our kids to help guide them and
finding they were about as effective as trying to get the dog to stop barking
maniacally at the mailman, it was our last ditch attempt.
We have discovered that Keeping Our Mouths Shut requires teamwork, and
perhaps a crisis hot line as well. For example, I was on the verge of telling
one kid, “If you go for a job interview with your hair spiked like that, you may
not get the job.” I had to report this urge to my husband, who restrained me
from offering any such useless advice, on pain of canceling my favorite credit
card.
Likewise, I must intercept his attempts at parenting. The other day, after
listening to a doomed attempt by one child trying to organize a garage sale with
his friends, my husband said, “I can’t take it anymore! I could tell him how to
salvage this mess in two minutes.” This was my cue to grab my husband’s arm and
tie him to the recliner until the temptation had passed.
“What good is all our life experience if we can’t teach it to our kids?” he
asked plaintively.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we should write a parenting book.”
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