Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.
This week, Ray offers advice on how to get your toddler to sit down to eat at the dinner table.
At Easter dinner, my two year old refused to sit in his chair. Reasoning, threatening, and pleading made no difference. I then had the desperate idea to conjure up a monster to help: I told him that the Easter bunny puts bad little boys in Easter eggs and turns them into chocolate if they don't listen to parents. He immediately stayed in his chair. I've since brought up the Easter bunny twice when he's behaving badly and: prompt, complete compliance. Is this good parenting, or great parenting?
You outwitted a 2-year-old and you want to renegotiate your contract? We won't shame you if this is your first child, but if you've done this before, we will see your ass on Dateline, and you're going to be the guest of honor at an autopsy. But in the interests of the notion that knowledge is for everybody, let's go through this systematically.
As we've covered, your little bail-bait is 2 and as such relatively easy to bamboozle. Or would be if 2-year-olds were that cognitively advanced. Among the things you're assuming here:
- He knows the ingredients of chocolate, and that children are not normally transmogrified into dairy products. Or that there is a thing known as dairy anything. They barely know that there are cows, and you think he understands the cow's role in the food chain? You're wasting your time raising him. Get him to MIT and leave him to the professionals because he's going to invent interstellar travel by the time he's 8 and be a complete pain in the ass by 11.
- He understands the intricacies of sacrificing children for compliance in behaviors he does not comprehend. Even Disney doesn't do shit like that. At least we don't think Disney does shit like that, and that's only because we stopped watching Disney stuff when our own kids turned six, when the worst-ever president was one of the Bush mutants instead of the peach-colored ooze we have now.
- He understands the essential concepts of good and evil, especially as applied by a fictional character. Waiting for a cannibal Santa must make his Christmas a real treat.
Now we don't mean to be dismissive here, and maybe little Otto is quite precocious even at an age which our own mother-in-law once described with this riddle: "You know why they make two-year-olds so cute? So you don't kill them." And she had 10 of the little miscreants, including two sets of twins, a level of stunt work/heroism that would make the entire roster of WWE urinate gravel in horror. In other words, we don't think little Raskolnikov understands a bit of what you've said, and definitely isn't making memories that will carry him through his formative years. You got lucky here, and while luck is a part of parenting, let's hold off on that victory lap, Rodolfo. Save it for when you're fighting a more prepared opponent, and your lies have to be more plausible than "Keep that up and you'll be trapped in a giant plastic egg and slowly decompose into an Almond Joy with eyes." In other words, up your game in your own head and drop the hammer when he's 12, when it's legal (at least in Georgia, Florida and West Virginia) to scare the little bastard sideways. Now go away.
