FROM CAROLYN

Obedience Training I was talking to our daughter-in-law on the phone the other day and she happened to mention that our nearly 2-year-old granddaughter was in trouble in time-out. It sent a dagger straight to my heart. It’s not that I don’t trust them as parents, it’s just that a grandchild is too young to be in “trouble,” no matter how old they get. We had a great discussion about discipline and then I told her never to tell me that my grandchildren are in trouble. Rather say, they are in training. The irony is that my own children were constantly in trouble. Like when the 3 Musketeers, consisting of our 3-year-old daughter and 1 ½ year old twin boys emptied the refrigerator and I caught them skating through pickle juice and mustard…forget the training. They were in trouble. Or when I caught the ringleader, red-handed, trying to stuff her twin brothers in the dryer. Time-out wasn’t the training I was looking for. Or when the 12 and 9-year-olds tied their younger brother to the chain-link fence and pantsed him. We lived near a busy highway. They weren’t in trouble because they didn’t tell me about it until years later. But Grandparent Hindsight makes you dotty. That’s why we should never raise our own grandkids. I am so happy for somebody else to do the “training” that I told our new son-in-law he was like getting a dog from the Pound. All you have to do is love them because somebody else has already done the training, and you can’t be blamed (or congratulated) for the outcome. Obedience training for dogs is very similar for young children. It requires patience and consistency. If you get mad, it confuses them, and they wet on the carpet anyway. But if you keep at it in the beginning, it will pay off later, and then they will squirt catsup all over the living room rug anyway. I still haven’t thought of an enforceable logical consequence for that one. You could threaten completely out of your head, as my dad did once when we older girls did not change the baby’s poopy diaper for an entire day while my parents were out of town. “Ok girls, now you’ll have to mess your pants instead of using the toilet!” We kept giggling, wondering how he was going to enforce it. It was impossible, even for him, to keep a stoic face after that one. You know, I’ll bet it was somebody’s grandchildren who made a game of bonking their senile great-grandfather on the head and then running for cover in a squeal of laughter. He must have been senile, or instead of swearing up a blue streak, he would have smiled when their dad caught them and pleaded, “Whatever you do, don’t get them in trouble.”