11B40 asked a good question, which is why I’m so focused on McQueary, when it was Sandusky who committed the crime.  It’s because I have no fellow feeling with Sandusky who, if the allegations are true, is a perverted monster.  I therefore don’t need to analyze my behavior or parenting decisions with regard to his conduct.  McQueary, however, is Everyman.  Each of us could be in his shoes.

McQueary’s response to a horrible, unexpected situation wasn’t perverse or illegal.  Instead, it was just the lowest common denominator of acceptable behavior that an ordinary human could commit.  I have within me the capacity to do exactly what he did — but I want to be better than that.  That’s why I’m also hammering away at columnists who explain what he did, not just to offer explanations, but also to excuse his conduct.  Like them, like all of us, I could be McQueary, but I don’t want to be McQueary.

Perhaps my obsession with this is also because I’m a parent in a morally challenging world, attempting to give my children moral lessons.  That hit home yesterday. As I hadn’t quite made it back to the house when my 12-year-old son got home from school, he called me, his voice trembling with unshed tears. “Mom, I have to tell you this. I need to confess. There was this old guy handing out little pocket Bibles at school [actually, next to the school, on non-school land]. Then, on the school bus home, one of the kids had candy and I wanted the candy and the kid said he’d give me the candy if I ripped up the Bible — and I did. Another boy threw a bunch of Bibles out the window.  I’m so sorry. I know what I did was wrong and I just had to tell you.”

When I got home, my son was still very upset, partially because he knew he’d done something wrong (both destroying a book and destroying a religious symbol) and partially because he was worried about getting expelled from school.  Without actually meaning to, I made him even more upset.  On my way back home after his call, I’d already called a friend whom I knew was taking her kids to a non-denominational youth night at the local church. I figured it would be good for my son immediately to go to a place where the book of God matters. When I mentioned I’d told her, he completely broke down, sobbing hysterically. “How could you? She won’t respect me any more.” (And I can’t tell you how glad I am to know that he realized that what he did would impair his standing in the eyes of the community.)

It got worse for my little guy when I opened my email and discovered an email from a friend and neighbor who didn’t know that my son had confessed, telling me about what happened and adding that several of the children on the bus were quite upset. “Oh, no! None of the parents will respect me anymore. This is horrible. I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean to destroy God’s property.” More sobbing. My son wrote our neighbor an abject apology for having committed an offensive act, and she sent a gracious reply.

I wasn’t pleased with what my son did, but I wasn’t angry at him.  It seemed to me that he was angry enough at himself.  He knew that he’d done an irresponsible and offensive act, although he did so foolishly and entirely without malice.  He also felt very keenly that what he had done might diminish him in the eyes of people he respects and whose respect he desires.

Indeed, I was quite pleased that he was upset and able to identify his own wrongdoing, rather than arrogant and dismissive.  He could have gone the other route:  “It’s just a book, and people who believe in it are stupid, and I should be able to rip up a book if I want, etc.”  That he didn’t, that he immediately realized he’d made a mistake, was a comforting reminder that my son is a fundamentally good person, who is simply a long way from maturity.  He is not, thank goodness, a punk or a sociopath.  A good (not angry or accusatory) talk about decency and respect, a total media blackout for two days, and a rather pleasant evening for him at a church youth group (he wants to go back) were, to my mind, entirely sufficient responses.

What was really interesting — and here we’re back at my whole obsession with McQueary and a society that passes the back and practices moral relativism — was the response from a liberal friend of mine.  Rather than acknowledging that my son had done something wrong, his ire was all focused on the old man who had handed out Bibles.

“That’s illegal.”  ”

No, it’s not.  He wasn’t on school property, and he wasn’t handing out anything that is illegal or that is prohibited to minors, such as drugs, alcohol, cigarettes or pornography.”

“Well, it ought to be illegal.  You can’t just hand out Bibles to people.”

“Um, actually, a little thing called the First Amendment says you can.”

He was shocked.

My friend’s next challenge was that handing out a Bible to school children was entrapment.

“That man was trying to entrap children.  He knew that most of them would throw it away and that boys would play with it.  There’s no difference between shredding it and throwing it in the garbage can.”

My friend was unconvinced when I pointed out that (a) the fact that many children on the bus were upset shows that treating a Bible with disrespect is not a natural or appropriate act and (b) that there is a difference between respectfully disposing of an unwanted item and deliberately destroying it in public view.  Intention matters.  And it was because intention matters that I was upset with my son for what he did, but I was neither angry nor perturbed.  His intentions weren’t blasphemous.  He just wanted candy.

Because issues such as this pop up in one form or another quite often when you have parents, you can see why I think long and hard about the messages we send our kids when it comes to right and wrong, and about responsibility to individuals and to society at large.

What do you all think, whether about my parenting decisions, about my McQueary tie-in, about societal messages, or anything else this post might have brought to mind?

Every time I return from a Navy League or Navy event, I lament the fact that we in the civilian world do not get to wear our honors and accomplishments on our hats, shoulders, chests or sleeves.  The fact that there is no official boasting mechanism in my suburban Mom life, though, doesn’t mean I can’t simply be like the cock, and crow on my own little dunghill.  Without further ado, I hereby give myself a good Mom award.

Honestly, I’ve really earned it.  Yesterday, my teenage daughter told her friends, “You can say anything in front of my Mom.  She’s never embarrassing and she gives really good advice.”  If I could have that engraved on a medal, I would.

Lest you think I earned that accolade because I’m the type of Mom who coos, “Of course you can have sex, do drugs and spend all my money, darling,” you’d be far off the mark.  In fact, I’m extremely opinionated, in a very socially conservative way.  Perhaps it’s my willingness to be a straight shooter, to shy away from innuendo, metaphor and deep agendas, that makes the children feel comfortable with me.

I find amusing the fact that my kids and their friends so obviously enjoy my company.  Thirty-five years after the fact, I’m finally popular in Middle School and High School.  I’m slow, but I get there!

It would be so nice if my children had inherited only my best qualities, plus their father’s best qualities too.  Then, they would have been brilliant, talented and gorgeous.  But that’s not how it worked out.  For one thing, they’ve got qualities, such as athleticism and self-discipline, that neither my husband nor I have.  (We’re both driven, not self-disciplined.)  Also, they inherited a good dose of our horribles too:  stubbornness, temper, etc.  Both my husband and I have, for these many years, been much more appreciative of what our own parents went through with us.  Bruce Kesler has also been thinking about his mother and her parenting experiences.

Sometimes the matched sets just write themselves.  Both of the articles I’m quoting here are from England.  The first in our set is an article saying that town councils across England are being told that they need to reinstate actual playgrounds.  The current versions, which are the kid equivalent of a padded room, are creating useless human beings:

Old-fashioned playground equipment like climbing frames, sand pits and paddling pools are set to be re-introduced after research found a degree of risk helps children to develop.

For years councils have felt forced to remove older attractions from their sites fearing any potential injuries could result in costly legal battles.

But recent research has shown that children actually benefit from risk when they play as it helps them develop the judgement skills they need in later life.

[snip]

Chairman Bernard Spiegal told the Sunday Times he believed Britain had been obsessed with risk assessment which was having a negative effect on children.

He said: ‘We were crippling their confidence by not letting them learn through experience.

‘We don’t want children losing fingers in badly designed swings or getting their heads trapped under a roundabout. But there’s nothing wrong with a bump, bruise and graze.’

I’ll add that current “safe” playgrounds don’t inspire much energy in the kids. The installations are so bland, the kids get bored quickly, and long for the less rigorous comforts of their computers and TV sets.

Before we head to the matched-set article, just have fixed firmly in your mind that Britain is a country that, out of an excess of nanny state caution, has rendered children’s physical play boring, essentially herding children back to the couch.

If you’ve got that notion firmly in mind, it’s time for article number two, which is harrowing. It all started a few years ago when a young boy banged his head and, because he was angry at his father, called his town’s version of Child Protective Services and accused his father of hitting him. Child Protective Services did exactly what one would expect it to do when dealing with a stable, middle class family — it latched onto it like a piranha or tick, and proceeded to suck the life out of the family.

The family’s sin? The kids are overweight. It’s now come to the point that Dundee’s CPS has announced that it will remove the four youngest children permanently, hiding them from the parents:

Four obese children are on the brink of being permanently removed from their family by social workers after their parents failed to bring their weight under control.

In the first case of its kind, their mother and father now face what they call the ‘unbearable’ likelihood of never seeing them again.

Their three daughters, aged 11, seven and one, and five-year-old son, will either be ‘fostered without contact’ or adopted.

[snip]

Warned that the children must slim or be placed in care, the family spent two years living in a council-funded ‘Big Brother’ house in which they were constantly supervised and the food they ate monitored.

[snip]

The couple have not committed any crime and are not accused of deliberate cruelty or abuse. Their solicitor, Joe Myles, said there was ‘nothing sinister lurking in the background’ and accused social workers of failing to act in the family’s best interests.

‘Dundee social services department appear to have locked horns with this couple and won’t let go,’ he said, adding that the monitoring project caused more problems than it solved. ‘The parents were constantly being accused of bad parenting and made to live under a microscope.

[snip]

Social workers became aware of the family in early 2008 after one of the sons accused his father of hitting him on the forehead. In truth, he had fallen and hit his head on a radiator – a fact he later admitted. However, the allegation opened the door to the obesity investigation.

While the couple admit experiencing what their lawyer calls ‘low grade’ parenting problems, which would have merited support, they were aghast when the issue of weight was seized on as a major concern.

[snip]

The couple were ordered to send their children to dance and football lessons and were given a three-month deadline to bring down their weight. When that failed, the children were placed in foster homes but were allowed to visit their parents.

After the couple objected to this arrangement, the council agreed to move them into a two-bedroom flat in a supported unit run by the Dundee Families Project. They insisted on the couple living with only three of their children at a time.

At meal times, a social worker stood in the room taking notes. Doctors raised concerns that the children put on weight whenever they spent time with their parents, a claim they vehemently denied.

[snip]

Although the children’s weight was the major concern, other allegations were included in a report. It showed that social workers were worried when the youngest child was found crawling unsupervised. The parents point out they were never far away and the flat had no stairs.

They also found her ‘attempting to put dangerous objects’ in her mouth. The family say this is natural in toddlers and she was never successful.

[snip]

The father, aged 56, said: ‘We have tried very hard to do everything that was asked of us. My wife has cooked healthy foods like home-made spaghetti bolognese and mince and potatoes; we’ve cut out snacks and only ever allowed the kids sweets on a Saturday. But nothing we’ve done has ever been enough.

‘The pressure of living in the family unit would have broken anyone. We were being treated like children and cut off from the outside world. To have a social worker stand and watch you eat is intolerable. I want other families to know what can happen once social workers become involved. We will fight them to the end to get our beloved children back.’

You can read the whole litany of social worker horribles here.

Anyone who has read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism will not be surprised by the family’s sufferings.  This kind of micromanagement is precisely what the “loving” nanny state does.  Indeed, think about the fact that Obama’s administration has taken to calling itself your “federal family.”  For those who thinks it’s a figure of speech, it’s not.  Socialist government does not believe that it can trust parents to raise the next generation of cogs in the government organization.

In the same way, anyone who has paid any attention at all to Child Protective Services agencies (in whichever country, and under whatever name they operate) knows that too many of these organizations are much less concerned with protecting genuinely at risk children (the beaten, starved and killed who make periodic newspaper headlines), and are much more concerned with forcing middle and working class families to abandon their parenting role or to risk being forced to hand their children over to the state.

There’s a reason I believe that CPS stands, not for Child Protective Services, but for “Causes Parental Suffering.”

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

The Bookworm Turns : A Secret Conservative in Liberal Land, available in e-format for the new low price of $2.99 at Amazon, Smashwords or through your iBook app.

My daughter started high school at our local public high.  It’s a great high school.  It’s got a beautiful facility, high quality staff, all the bells and whistles you can think of, an involved parent body, and a whole lot of very nice kids.  I always knew all that, but I had that information reinforced when I attended my first PTA meeting.

I learned something else at the local PTA meeting:  drug and alcohol use are “rampant” (their word, not mine) at this high school.  By the time the kids are juniors and seniors, there’s a “culture” of abuse.  It’s part of “the fabric” of the students’ social lives.

Part of the problem is the curse of affluence.  The kids have the wherewithal to buy high quality fake IDs and the money to spend on drugs and alcohol.  The other part of the problem is something that never occurred to me — parents.  As I confirmed with some internet searching later, there’s a trend amongst parents to host pot and alcohol parties for their children.  The theory behind these illegal parties is these parents’ belief that, if the drug and alcohol use is done under their aegis, they can keep it “safe” and “responsible.”

Plain common sense tells how wrong this attitude is.  I confirmed my common sense by speaking with my daughter when she came home from school.  I told her precisely what I’d learned, and warned about parties where parents offer alcohol.  She said, “If we hadn’t talked about this, and some parent offered me a glass of wine, I would have thought it was okay and taken it.”  It’s that simple.  If authority figures say something is okay, then it must be.

Amazingly, Disney (Disney!) handles this issue of parental approval surprisingly well in 17 Again.  The plot device is that a man is suddenly transformed into a 17 year old (played by Zac Efron), and finds himself in school with his own children, a boy who is being bullied, and a girl who is dating the bully.  This scene is about condoms (and ignore the execrable Margaret Cho as the sex ed teacher), with Efron’s character watching in horror as a basket of condoms is handed to his own daughter:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Although the movie doesn’t come out and say so, I do believe that someone at the Disney studio disapproved of a high school teacher saying, “To hell with abstinence.  You guys can just have condoms because we’re too weak to stop you from hurting and demeaning yourselves.”

But back to the drug issue.  I also learned that, if my kids throw a wholesome party (a few vetted and trusted friends) and that party is crashed by drug/alcohol users, if those gatecrashers get into trouble after leaving my property, I’m still liable.  (As a lawyer, I knew this; as a mother, I had refused to recognize it.)  The way to short circuit liability is to call the police.  The police representative at the school said kids should know this too, as these events often happen to hapless kids when their parents are away for an evening.  The host kid should feel no compunction about placing a non-emergency call to the police, especially since our local police are extremely nice people.

I thought this was good advice, but I added my own warning to the kids:  If any kid ever uses drugs or alcohol on my property, in the house or in the yard, I will rip that child’s head off and celebrate as I watch the blood splatter on the ceiling.  The kids laughed, but I think they got the message.

In Marin County, spanking a child is a very dangerous activity.  Although spanking is not illegal, it’s enough to entangle you with Child Protective Services and, from that moment on, parenting life as you know it is over.  Despite the danger, when my kids were little, I spanked them.  With two unguided missiles, sometimes the only way I could get control over the situation was a quick smack.  With a four year old, reasoning doesn’t work; taking away privileges is too time-attenuated; and my kids didn’t care about time-outs.  A quick spanking relieved my anger and gave them a very quick lesson in cause and effect (cause:  naughty; effect:  spanking).

It turns out now that my secret forays into old-fashioned discipline were a gift to my children:

Children who are smacked by parents often turn out more successful than those who have not, research has found.

The study concluded that children who had been physically disciplined when they were young, between the ages of 2 and 6, were performing better as teenagers on almost every measure that was taken into consideration than those who had never been smacked.

It was only in cases where it continued beyond the age of 12 that the children were found to be affected negatively, resulting in a dip on performance indicators.

The results of the US-based study undermines the efforts of various campaigners who have been trying to have physical punishment outlawed in the UK, who have claimed that it causes long-term damage to the children.

Read the rest here.

I only wish I could have been able to smack them on a more regular basis when they were really naughty little kids.  (Not beat, smack.)  As it was, because of the dangers inherent in corporal punishment, the situation had to be very extreme before I resorted to spanking.  I think my life would have been easier and, I think, they might have been more disciplined now.

Back in November 2007, I wrote a long post talking about the fact that I see a lot of children who are labeled as having Asperger’s (a subset of autism) but who seem instead (or also) to be the victims of profoundly bad parenting.  I noted that I have known over the years children who are actually profoundly disabled, and whose disability has been given the Asperger’s/autism label.  These correctly diagnosed children are quite different from the problem kids I identified in my earlier post.  The children I identified in my post, the ones I thought were victims of diagnostic overkill rather than an actual disability, weren’t kids who lack language skills, or control over their bodies, or who have obsessive interests that impair their ability to function, or who fail to recognize ordinary human emotions.  The kids I know who fall into those latter categories of genuine disability are, frankly, doing wonderfully well and working vigorously to maximize all of their strengths.

Instead, in my November post, I was talking about the children who are prone to chronic tantruming and who get slapped with an Aspergers label as a sop to the parents.  Here is how I described these children, all of whom have on their “permanent records” labels that place them within the autism spectrum:

Where I’m about to get controversial is my sense that, in some cases, Aspergers is the diagnosis given to children whose parents are not parenting. I know three — count ‘em, three — children who are nightmarish behavior problems. What characterizes all three of them is the uncontrollable temper tantrums they have. And I’m not talking about 2 or 3 year olds lying on the floor hollering “No!” I’m talking about kids who are 7 or 8 or even 11 or 12 and who regularly engage in scenes that involve uncontrolled screaming, hurling insults and, often, physical violence against other adults or children. Because of the scenes — and only because of these scenes — each set of parents eventually took the child to a psychiatrist. That is, the parents did not take their kids to the psychiatrists because they weren’t socializing well or because they were obsessed with a single subject at school. They took them because of those off-the-charts tantrums. In all three of the cases I know, the psychiatrists diagnosed the kids with Asbergers.

But here’s what I didn’t tell you about those three children: In each of the three cases, the parents (in my humble estimation) earn an “F” for structure and discipline. The common pattern in each of those households is that one or both of the parents feels an almost excessive sympathy for the kid when he (or she) is frustrated or unhappy. What the child wants, the child gets. One of the children I’m thinking of ruled the whole household. She dictated what was eaten, what wasn’t eaten, where people went, what they did, what bed time was, what toys and games were bought and rejected, etc. The parents thought that they were making her happy, but to an objective observer, the child was miserable. It was way too heavy a burden to place on a 10 year old, and she was a frenzied, hysterical tyrant who was unable to cope if anything didn’t go her way.

What also characterizes all of these parents is that, when the child has a tantrum, regardless of how awful it is, and what havoc it creates, the parents respond, not with discipline, but with sympathy: “The poor little thing. He couldn’t control himself. He was so upset I didn’t have the heart to punish him.” And in each case, this sympathetic response to the child’s tantrums worsens after the diagnosis. Now the parent is not only sorry for the child, but he’s convinced that the child is “sick” and must be handled with ever greater care.

Apparently I’m not the only one who has noticed this diagnostic trend — that is, to reach a psychiatric conclusion that all tantruming little children have a disease — although I pointed it out tactfully and to a small audience.  Radio host Michael Savage apparently made the same point, but did so in way that managed to offend everyone:

Radio talk show host Michael Savage, who described 99 percent of children with autism as brats, said Monday he was trying to “boldly awaken” parents to his view that many people are being wrongly diagnosed.

Some parents of autistic children have called for Savage’s firing after he described autism as a racket last week. “In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out,” Savage said on his radio program last Wednesday.

Savage offered no apology in a message posted Monday on his Web site. He said greedy doctors and drug companies were creating a “national panic” by overdiagnosing autism, a mental disorder that inhibits a person’s ability to communicate.

On his radio show last week, he said: “What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, `Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, you idiot.’”

As I already demonstrated months ago, I think Savage is on to something.  While all of us recognize that there are genuinely disabled kids out there, kids whose behaviors span the spectrum from severe autism to geeky Aspergers, those of us who are honest recognize that there is also a major epidemic of bad, weak, inconsistent parenting out there, and that it is creating thousands of damaged kids who are treated, not with good parenting, but with bad medicine.  I’m only sorry that it was Savage who made this point, because you can count on him being so spectacularly tactless and inflammatory that the message gets lost in the ruckus.

All of us have noted a trend, one that is especially prevalent in public schools, to insulate kids from losing.  I know that my kids’ public school, as part of its master plan, has instituted a policy by which the kids don’t do any competitive sports on campus in order to protect them from dealing with loss.

I think this is an appalling idea.  As I frequently tell my children, they’ll lose way more often in life than they’ll win.  In order to succeed in life, they have to have a hunger for winning, coupled with the ability to deal with losing.  I tell them that when you lose, you’re sad, you try to figure out how you can do better next time, you suck it up, and then you get on with it.

I actually have a very personal reason for feeling this way.  My parents were very rigorous, demanding parents.  I did not grow up in a loosey-goosey home except for one thing:  If I lost or didn’t do well at something, my mother was so sympathetic that, if I wanted, I was allowed to walk away.  I can’t tell you the number of things, academic, musical and athletic that I abandoned along the way.

I understand and appreciate my Mom’s motives.  She’d had a really terrible life (the usual “terrible” stuff of divorce and dislocation, compounded by several years interned by the Japanese in Indonesia during WWII).*  She so wanted me to have the happiness and security that she had missed.  Part of that was wonderfully done, by giving me love and structure and fairly high expectations.  And part of it was too soft, and didn’t teach me to deal with adversity.

The end result is that my default mode is to be a whiny quitter.  It’s only by high effort from my adult brain that I’m not a whiny, quitting adult.  I do stick with things, but it’s not easy.

I long ago figured out that I needed to do things differently for my kids.  I found my role model about eight years ago when we were visiting some relatives with three very athletic children.  The kids were running around madly, when suddenly the youngest squealed, and ran up to his Dad crying, with a bloody nose and fat lip.  His Dad enveloped him in a hug, said some truly sympathetic words, cleaned him up and threw him back in the game.  There was no lingering over his physical injuries or wallowing in his psychic wrongs.  The boy is now both a basketball and a baseball star, as well as a very sweet person.

I was thinking of all of this today because, over the last couple of weeks, my daughter has had run-ins with a little girl, as well as with the girls’ mother.  I don’t think I’m being unduly partisan when I say that, while I can be as critical of my child as the next person, my child has the right of things here.

You see, both girls are competing in the same sport, at the same age level.  My daughter adores the activity and has gone from abysmally horrible to pretty darn good.  The other child went from okay to okay.  She hasn’t seen the improvement my daughter has, probably because she doesn’t love the sport as my daughter does.

When my daughter was at rock bottom in the weekly competitions, and everyone else she knew was doing well, she was sad about her own failures, but applauded her friends’ successes (and I know this is true, because I saw her in action).  As my daughter has improved, over-taking this other girl, the other girl has not been a good loser.  Every time she does less well than my daughter, she has a tearful tantrum.

If that were all, it would be just between the girls, and that would be the end of it.  Last week, though, when my daughter ran up, flush with her first success, the mother turned on my daughter for daring to be happy in front of her own psychically wounded little girl.  She then proceeded to spend the next hour lavishing her daughter with attention in an effort to cheer her up.  As for me, I was stuck trying to explain to my daughter why someone yelled at her for being happy.

I’m perfectly willing to agree that my daughter, glorying in her first win after weeks of big losses, probably was completely insensitive to the other girl’s anguish.  Part of that insensitivity, though, was that my daughter has learned, as I’ve taught her, to suck it up.  Acknowledge your loss, feel bad about it for a minute, and then move forward.  She was totally incapable of comprehending a family dynamic that rewards  sore losing with enormous attention — and gifts.

These people are good friends, and I’m not going to damage a solid friendship over this one — which is why I’m venting here and not talking to my friend.  It’s also good for my daughter to learn that not everyone is as tough as she is and to develop the compassion to deal with them, even if she believes there response to be excessive or bizarre.

Mostly, though, I feel sorry for the other girl.  As I know to my own cost (and my mother was not as solicitious as this mother), it’s terrible to go through life not knowing how to lose or deal with adversity.  Sooner or later, something bad is going to happen that you can’t walk away from, and you’ll be stuck trying to deal with it without having developed any coping mechanisms at all.

___________________________

*My Mom’s experiences at camp are one of the things that keep me from being quite as whiny as I could be.  For example, with today’s heat wave, when I was at the sports event today and temperatures were hitting 100, it was tempting to whine about how unbearable it was.  Then I remembered that, in camp, when the guards were feeling particularly malevolent, they’d impose a collective punishment on a camp filled with women (young and old) and children:  Everybody would have to stand in formation, in the tropical sun, for 24 hours.  Unsurprisingly, large numbers of them died where they stood.  I can therefore take a few hours under an awning with a cool drink in my hand.  If I whine, I keep the tone light.

UPDATED:  I am very, very happy to report that my friend herself figured out that her daughter needs to toughen up.  It turned out that, after today’s breakdown, she gave her daughter a good talking to about learning how to lose.  I’m so pleased.  These are good friends, and people I really value, and it was very hard dealing with situation involving our girls that had us using such diametrically different approaches to a common scenario.

Still, while this problem is resolved (Hurrah!), parents here continue to have a really sad inability to let their children deal with the fact that life is not fair.  On that same point, if you haven’t yet read Joseph Epstein’s The Kindergarchy, you really should.

I never thought about it, but I was running my house like a commune.  The kids had chores to do, of course, but the incentive was the greater good, my approbation, and an allowance that, in their minds, had no relationship to the tasks demanded.  The kids did not find these incentives inspiring, and the days and works tended to be a blur of my pushing, and pushing, and their pushing back.  I was frustrated, they were resentful, and the house chaotic.

Aside from the practical stalemate of a sort of general household chaos, the “incentives” of “the greater good” and punishment did not work very well at controlling behavioral problems either.  The kids fought like cats and dogs, whined more than one would have thought possible, and thought that interrupting me was an Olympic sport.

Believe it or not, they are nice kids, but life has been a day to day struggle to achieve things that, in the perfectly run “communist” household of my youth, worked well.  As to my youth, my sister reminded me that it probably worked well because my mother, who is a lovely woman, nevertheless carried a a very big stick.  Also, my sister and I were exceptionally biddable children (probably because of that same stick).

I decided this summer to switch to capitalism, aided by the fact that the kids have very strong commercial desires — he wants a Rip Stick and she (I blush to admit this) Abercrombie clothes.  Here’s the method I devised:

I have a lot of big tasks in the house that have been bedeviling me, mostly in the form of closets that badly need organizing.  There are also the usual things of dirty kitchens, clean (but full) dishwashers, and stacks of clean, unfolded laundry.  I told the kids that, on a daily basis, I will assign them a task with a good salary.  Not a piddling 50 cents or $1 per task, but $5 to $20 per child, depending on the task’s magnitude.

There are conditions, however.  First, they must listen well as I explain the task.  Second, while doing the task, they cannot fight with each other or come whining to me.  If they don’t understand something, they may interrupt me only if it brings the task to a dead halt.  Otherwise, they have to set aside things that confuse them and wait until they’ve reached a functional wall.  If they commit any of the bad employee sins — not listening, fighting, whining, or excessive interrupting — I dock their pay, to the point where they may find themselves doing the task for no money at all.

My husband, to my surprise, thought this was a wonderful idea.  He offered a further incentive.  If the kids could get through the whole summer without having their pay docked, he’ll double whatever they earn from me.

We put the system in effect yesterday and it was the first day ever that the kids cleaned their rooms, tidied the house, and organized a closet without fighting, whining or interrupting me every second.  The whole thing flowed.  They leaped from project to project with enthusiasm and good will.  At the end of the day, they eagerly counted their earnings, projected ahead to the time at which they’d be able to make their purchases, and expressed surprise at (a) how fun it had been to work well and (b) how nice it was not to fight.

I couldn’t resist, of course, and gave them a little lesson in the differences between communism and capitalism.  They completely understood how, with money as the hub, we were all able to achieve our goals:  they moved further towards their Rip Stick and Abercrombie clothes, and I got a tidy house, an organized closet, and two well-behaved kids.

I’ll try to keep you posted on this capitalist experiment.

I would like your opinion. Mr. Bookworm thinks I’m taking “holier than thou-ness” to a nauseating (and hypocritical) extreme. I think he is on the verge of a parenting error. Here’s the deal:

Mr. Bookworm came across an opportunity to obtain some stuff for the kids without actually going through the shopping process. Indeed, early tonight, he was so strong in his belief that he will be doing this that he told the kids he might be getting a gift for them.

“But if I do, you can’t tell any of your friends about it,” he told. “You have to promise not to.”

“Why not,” I asked?

“Because, well, because it’s illegal.”

My daughter was instantly concerned that the police would be after her. After we assured her they wouldn’t break down our door (especially because this is all hypothetical right now), my husband and I took the discussion out of the kids’ hearing.

I told my husband I strongly disapproved of his going ahead with this project. I’m not worried about the cops breaking down the door. I also conceded that, yes, in the past and in small ways, I too have deviated from the straight and narrow. Heck, I’m willing to bet that each of us has in our possession a CD a friend made for us, filled with songs the friend copied from various albums, and that we’ve made, and given, identical CDs to friends. In other words, I wasn’t fool enough to claim the moral high ground on this one.

My really big problem was that I thought the message my husband sent to the kids, with his warnings about silence, was that it’s okay to steal, as long as you don’t get caught. He responded with long, convoluted arguments about the fact that we weren’t really stealing because, because, because, because, each of which I was able to shoot down. (They were all self-serving sophistry, if you ask me.) He also said I never would have taken this position if it weren’t for my blogging. (Apparently blogging conservatively gives you abnormally heightened sensitivities about honesty and how children perceive parental behavior.)

I really didn’t want to argue about the merits of obtaining the stuff, though, since I thought that was a distraction from the main issue. As far as I was concerned, the whole thing came to a screeching halt, without any further room for discussion, when my husband told the kids that he was thinking about giving them something “illegal” (his word), so they couldn’t tell anyone. The unspoken statement there was that, if they keep mum about it, it’s okay. (The funny thing was, when I asked him why he told the kids the stuff would be illegal, he announced that it was because he was being “honest.”)

In my mind, if we go down this path, we’re paving the way for our kids, when they get older, to believe that they can engage in any type of forbidden activity, as long as they keep it secret. That’s true whether they promise me they’ll go to one friend’s house but, instead, sneak off to another’s; or they take drugs or alcohol; or they have sex; or they cheat; or any of a number of activities parents don’t want for their kids. The fact that, as adults, they may actually do those things, and that many adults commonly commit little crimes and lies (“No, really, that skirt is darling on you!” “Honest, officer, the light was yellow.”), doesn’t mean it’s okay for that message to come from the parents.

So, back to my original question: Am I being an insufferable prig when I say that a parent is setting a terrible example by telling the kids that something they’re getting is illegal, so they better keep it secret?