Things I’ve Heard Myself Say Aloud to My Kids

I just told everyone to keep their bodies to themselves in the car, and then you put your feet on the back of your brother’s head, and we see you’re on your phone, which we repeatedly asked you to leave at home, and so now there’s going to have to be a big consequence, and now a chasm has opened between my consciousness and the words emerging from my mouth, and I hear a cascade of scolding clichés rush forth in a frictionless flow, as if I’m an A.I. chatbot with the prompt “Lecture my kids in a style that they will completely ignore and will cause me deep sadness,” because I don’t know where all this boilerplate hectoring comes from, but the reason we keep our bodies to ourselves is that we treat our bodies and other people’s bodies with respect, and if you keep doing that we’re going to tell Nana how you behaved. Could Nana be the one who planted this forest of platitudes in my brain, where it silently germinated until the moment when—stop that right now, we told you that word is inappropriate, and it’s even more inappropriate to sing it repeatedly as a catchy jingle so that your brother remembers it and repeats it in the Fives Room at preschool, so if we hear it again it means we have a listening problem, and it means that at some point I must have unwittingly memorized a book titled “Empty Threats for Desperate Weenies.” All I know is that if we don’t start improving our rule following we’re going to start examining why we say everything in the first-person plural, because we sure seem afraid of the implications of saying that it is you who have upset me and that I have decided to enforce a boundary that might cause you unhappiness, and that’s why you’re going to lose Switch for a week, or at least I’ll hide MLB: The Show under an old nasal-strip box in the nightstand and then forget where I put it. Sticker chart.

I’ll get you an ice cream if you don’t complain about swim lessons for the rest of the year. Regular cone, no Cherry Merlin. Definitely no energy drink called Bust, created by a TikTok M.M.A. fighter with a blue Lambo. Six Quiet Points.

I made you a waffle because you said you wanted a waffle. So please sit down and eat it. It’s the same kind you had yesterday. It’s not “the yellow kind.” You like this kind. It has the cartoon bat on the box. The kind you don’t like—which you actually do like—is the healthy kind, and you can tell it’s healthy because the box has a realistic drawing of a bear. Just eat this apple slice. It’s not “the sour kind.” Yes, you can eat the mark on the skin. You earned three Star Coins.

This is why we don’t want you to watch YouTube. We know there are good things on there, like art tutorials and science experiments with squirrels, but even when you pick something that’s O.K. for kids the site keeps suggesting other, inappropriate videos and you keep clicking on them. You started by watching “55 Impossible Ping-Pong Trick Shots” and now you’ve been recruited to a militia called Lions for Christ. I’m taking four Reading Magnets off the Reward Timer.