As a follow-up to my earlier review about unsolicited comments about incoming babies(http://catholiclight.blogspot.com/2002_09_22_catholiclight_archive.html#85500136), here's the latest one. My wife Paige and I were at the radiology office today, looking at our latest offspring, and the radiology doctor is amazed that we have two little kids with another on the way. "You'll have three kids under five!" she says. "Actually, three under four," Paige corrects. "You're crazy!" saith the doc. She repeats this assertion several times.
The doctor then tells us that she's got an eight-month-old who doesn't sleep through the night, and who always throws her food over the side of her high-chair. She can't bring herself to discipline her daughter, and she won't let the baby cry herself to sleep. Our daughter, Anna, is two years old, and has a willful streak you wouldn't believe. However, if she does something bad, we scold her. If she does something really bad, we spank her. When she was about eight weeks old, we let her cry herself to sleep when she went to bed -- and like magic, she's slept through the night ever since. Who, ladies and gentlemen of the world, are the crazy parents?
My point isn't to gloat about our superior parenting skills, but rather to say that making little kids behave isn't horribly difficult. I hang with a lot of toddlers these days, and Paige hangs with many more, and in our experience there's a stong correlation between good behavior and judicious encouragement and punishment. When they are tiny, they respond to, "If you eat your dinner, you get to eat a cookie," or "If you draw on the wall again, you get a spanking." I'm told it's harder for teenagers, who have allegedly reached the age of reason.
The doctor represents many who love to over-dramatize their childrearing struggles. It really saddens me to hear parents roll their eyes and go into their sob stories about how hard it is to raise their two darlings. I think to myself: two kids? With clothes washers, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, power locks in cars, and non-rectal thermometers, two kids are kicking your parental butts? Your great-grandmother probably raised at least four or five, and she probably didn't have any modern convenience except for indoor plumbing, maybe.
The reason it's sad is because they're using their exhaustion -- which probably comes at least in part because they consider leisure activities like television as if they're holy obligations -- as an excuse not to have more children. Don't misunderstand: I know how hard it is to run a family even with labor-saving devices. Some kids are worse-behaved than others; some are born with disabilities; some families aren't materially blessed. My heart goes out to anyone bringing up children under truly difficult circumstances. Most people around here don't fit into that category.
When I hear stories like the doctor's, I think, at least she has to deal with the consequences and I don't. But I'm forgetting that someday her kid will be released into the world, and we will all have to live with the brattiness.
(By the way, somebody should give me a remedial class on Blogger, and tell me how to make my dang URLs into gen-u-wine links.)
