Dear Old Silly Sunday – This is Parenting?

Dear Old Silly-

My mom. She’s like, always up in my face about my two kids. Says they don’t have any manners just because they don’t say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and they call their elders by their first names or maybe ‘old man’ or ‘old lady’ – you know, they way most kids do these days. Just the other day she came over to my house and my kids were just being kids, screaming at each other and fighting, teasing the cat, watching TV on the living room floor while eating pizza and sure, they were spilling tomato sauce on the carpet, but … I mean, look. I’m a single mom, okay? My sperm donor so-called man friend left a long time ago. And I do try my best to keep them in line, I make them take timeouts, even though it breaks my heart to do so. And I yell at them a lot, really I do. But I refuse to spank them like my mom says I should. No way. I remember when I got spanked as a kid and I swore I’d never damage my kids like that – what about their tender egos? … and I’ve read that you can damage their livers, too.

But she just won’t butt out. Keeps saying I’ll be sorry one day if I don’t discipline my children. Well, what about their feelings? I want my kids to grow up feeling well adjusted and free – not bound by damaged psyches and all afraid they’ll be smacked around if they simply want to have fun in life.

So what do you recommend, Old Silly? How can I raise my kids the way I feel is best and still deal with my old fashioned buttinsky mother?

Sincerely,

Nancy O Cleau

~~~~~

Dear Ms. N O Cleau-

Apparently you were not disciplined strenuously or frequently enough as a child, either that or you were born mentally and psychologically challenged so no amount of dsiciplining administered by your parents would have helped anyway. I wish you had written me long before you had children so I could have advised you to not, under any circumstances, procreate. But the damage has already been done, you have gone and weakened the gene pool.

What to do from here? Move your children in with your mother, if she’ll have them, and let her take over the raising of your kids. They’ll be much better off. Perhaps she can beat the living bejeeebers out of them enough to get them back on track as possible contributers to society rather than growing up to be unmannered, self-serving, lazy slackards with no sense of familial, civic, or societal responsibility. It could happen. I’ve seen the reversal done effectively, albeit, admittedly, in rare cases.

As for you? You move in with mom too, now that I think best of the situation. Start over. Let mother (and father too, I hope?) re-raise you in proper fashion and this time appreciate the fact that true freedom comes through discipline.

And please? No more kids without a real man who desires to be not just a sperm donor stud but also a good, responsible father and husband.

Yours Very Truly,

The Old Silly

Click on Tweety Bird and tweet this post if you liked it!