Abdication of Parenting part II

My friend Jessie sent out an e-mail to me and mutual friends:

JESSIE: This is probably one of the funniest Will Ferrell skits.....EVER!!!

It features a home-made skit wherein Will Ferrell faces off with his landlady, an 18 month old little girl who says "Where's my money, bitch?" and "You're an asshole."

I replied:

DAVE: That was horrendously unfunny. What's funny about a 3 year-old cursing? Ha ha. Oh my God. Wait, that's still not funny.

And what's with the afro?

Jessie pointed out she wasn't 3, and that my answer was typical of me, "not that that's a bad thing." At this point I realized everyone was missing the picture - so I illuminated the issue as best I could in the appropriate rant.

Abdication of Parenting
Oh she’s 18 months old? Ah ha ha ha! See? Now it’s funny.

Abdication of Parenting, I wrote about it in my blog. Now, apologies for being a wet blanket, but if anyone wonders why my daughters spontaneously clean the living room and kitchen without being asked, it’s because we pay a lot of attention to how we raise them.

Now the great thing is just about anyone’s kids can be like this, it all falls on the parent. Used to be a time when children worked – Kenny’s wife Jen asked as soon as she saw my daughters “Do you make them work?” (Jen is a very recent immigrant from China.)

Kim (the other David's wife) said something like “Goodness no, they’re children.”

But I knew what Jen meant and said “Yes, they do. They clean their room every morning, my oldest is the little mother for her baby brother, and my 7yo handles all of her older sister’s old chores now, like washing dishes, cleaning parts of the house…”

“Gooood!” Jen said.

What was magical about this encounter was that I found that there are parts of the world that still understand that children don’t grow up hard-working, successful and respectful unless you raise them that way – and the only way to teach it is to make them do it.

I made my 10yo burn her arm taking hot Pizza out of the oven. I knew it might happen, because she was scared. She’s done it five times since without a problem, and powdered vitamin C and later, liquid vitamin E in capsules has made the burn vanish.

Who here has those kind of huevos with their kids? (Mexican slang for balls, word means eggs but no one uses it for that.) I felt bad when she came running to me, because I predicted it – but I remember horseback riding, I remembered that, at the end of the day, it wasn’t my father or mother who taught me to ride, it was getting on that horse that did it.

So when she’s hungry at night, she doesn’t go asking Mom to make her something, nor snack on dried fruit or crackers – she busts out a frozen pizza and cooks it and gives her parents (only people still up past 8pm) some. I was sitting in my recliner working on my computer and she came up to me with Pizza. “You’re mother make that.” “No, me. I’m hungry. He he.”

10 years old.

So, no. Until Will Ferrell demonstrates that the Main Stream Media’s picture of “All children are terribly behaved, they hate their parents when they are teenagers and nobody gets along, so you might as well have fun with them when they’re little” is wrong, and only normal because folks either don’t know how to raise them or don’t care to, I don’t find it funny. I’m sure that any skits he does with teenagers will present just the picture I gave, and never include a respectful, hard working teenager who is funny because she’s ditzy or playful or smart.

And that’s sad.

Sorry for the morning rant – but I take it seriously – and so far I’ve gotten decent results.