The Dollar School of Lame Parenting

Sometimes I imagine that our family’s life is being filmed for one of those nanny reality shows, where the kids are out of control, the parents are clueless, and everyone is saved by a no-nonsense nanny and her Naughty Chair. For the most part, we are free of the most egregious behaviors that these families exhibit. We don’t yell venomous insults at each other in front of the children (or ever, for that matter), we don’t let bedtime go on for hours, we don’t respond to one sibling whacking another in the head with a pleading, “Please stop that now honey!” But while I may not subject my kids to damaging rage or withering disinterest, I am guilty of what I would call “lame parenting.” I’m sure that Supernanny would have quite a bit to say about this style of child-rearing.

By lame parenting, I mean a kind of pathetic inability to get it all together, to do things consistently, and do them consistently well. Here’s an example. Some years ago, I read about a disciplinary technique whereby you start each day with a particular word (such as a child's name) written on a dry-erase board. Throughout the day, whenever a child is misbehaving, you simply walk over to the board and erase a letter. If all the letters get erased, there is some sort of consequence—no dessert, no TV, whatever. This sounded like such a lovely, calm, consistent way of disciplining. There’s no yelling or negotiation, just a serene walk over to the board, an authoritative sweep of the eraser, and the message is sent and received, just like that.

Though I liked this idea, it took me several years before deciding to try it. In general, I do not subscribe to the chart-and-reward school of parenting, whereby good behaviors earn stickers or tickets or chips, bad behaviors lose said trinkets, rewards are given or privileges removed, and it’s all so clear and neat and mutually understood and blah blah blah. I tend more toward the “Because I said so” school of parenting.

But with three children who are increasingly independent and interested in exerting their will over each other and their parents, it seemed time to try this. One afternoon, I was down in the basement switching the laundry and—as they always do—one of the kids decided they needed me absolutely right this minute, even though I had been hanging around doing stuff in the kitchen and completely available for maybe an hour and no one needed me that whole time. And then—as they always do—instead of figuring that Mom generally doesn’t go out for a beer in the middle of the afternoon, leaving us all alone, so she must be around here somewhere, so maybe I should walk around the house and see where she is, and hey, she could even be in the basement, so let me check there…no, instead of thinking that, this child decided to lay on the couch calling for me, then screaming, then weeping and screaming all at the same time, until I came thundering up the stairs and boy, then I bet she wished I’d go back to my mysterious mother hiding place and leave her alone.

After my outburst was done, I realized we needed to do something. I needed to lay some basic ground rules, such as, “Don’t scream and weep for Mom when you haven’t actually gotten off the couch to look for her,” but also governing how much TV they watch and whether they help with toy clean-up at the end of the day. The kids needed a better understanding of what I expect—instead of trying to figure it out based on when Mom totally loses it, which is admittedly unpredictable—and I needed a check on my own behavior, so I wouldn’t let them leave a huge mess all over the den just because I didn’t feel like getting into a struggle, and then subject them to periodic head explosions that are usually out of proportion to the offense.

So I wrote up a simple list of rules, covering TV time, basic chores and physical injury to siblings, among other things, and posted it by the phone. On the dry-erase board hanging nearby, I wrote “DOLLARS.” I explained that we will start each day with a full complement of letters, and that any time one of our basic rules is broken or a child otherwise misbehaves, we will erase a letter. If all the letters are erased in a day, then there will be no dessert after supper and no more TV that day. This is a communal system; no matter whose action causes a letter to be erased, if all the letters are erased, everyone lives with the consequences.

(If I were writing this for Family Fun magazine, this is where I’d describe the peace and love that saturates our household now that we have a consistent, fair system for helping the kids meet our expectations of reasonable behavior.)

This letter-erasing system sounds so logical and simple, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. I realized this a few days after instituting it, when we erased a whole bunch of letters toward the end of the day. Someone asked, “What happens if all the letters get erased, but by then it’s bedtime?” Ummmm…well then, um, I guess there’s no dessert or TV tomorrow. What’s that thing that parenting advice articles always tell you about discipline? That the consequence needs to match the offense? That consequences can’t be delayed because young children can’t make those connections? Oh yeah. But I don’t know how else to handle this. So I’m sticking with tomorrow. Today’s consequences will be postponed until tomorrow. It makes no sense, and an entire day with no TV punishes me most of all because I use that time to write or get chores done. But whatever.

And then I realized I had another problem. I found that Daniel and I were saying, ‘I’ll erase a letter,” as a warning, to get them to stop whatever they were doing. But we were rarely actually erasing the letter. Because whenever we would do that, there was either 1) a great chorus of screaming and moaning and weeping about it. “Nooooooooooooooooo! Don’t erase a letter! No! No! No!”, after which at least one child would fall to a heap on the floor, limbs flailing, face turning red; or 2) the offending child would say, with infuriating you-can’t-make-me freshness, “Go ahead. I don’t care if you erase a letter.” This is helping us have a calmer household where everyone knows and respects the rules? I don’t think so.

Then this past week, a new wrinkle appeared. The kids started threatening each other with the accursed erasing of the letters. Meg grabs something from Ben. Ben furrows his brow and points his finger, “I’m. Going. To. Erase. A. LETTER!” I respond with, “No, only Mom and Dad can erase a letter.” Ben’s brow furrows deepen. “No. I will erase a letter.” What am I going to do? Erase a letter because Ben is threatening to erase a letter? This is getting a little absurd.

Here comes the final straw. You could see this coming, couldn’t you? I do something wrong. I say I’ll get them some goldfish crackers, for example, then get distracted by looking through the mail and forget. Some minor slip-up like that. And one of them says, all tease-y and sing-songy, “Mom! I’m going to erase a letter!”

Can I just say that I hate the ^#*&^% letters?

For now, the “DOLLARS” is still on our dry-erase board. Someone has made the “O” into a dinosaur, and someone else wrote in the “S” backwards. Some days, one or two letters get erased. We’ve never erased the whole thing. Which I guess means that my kids never experience any consequences from their bad behavior.

I think I’m going back to, “Because I said so.” And occasional yelling. It’s much less confusing and much less work.

So lame.