Basic Training

I think that we've missed the point. Or at least a lot of us have missed the point. Or at the very least, some of missed the point. Or just me, but I feel much more comfortable discussing my shortcomings if I lump some other people in with me, and since we have what, say six billion people on this planet, I'm fairly positive that there is at least one small group of people that fit into the category that I'm describing. So, even though I am lumping myself in with a completely different category of people who don't want to take the blame, I am also lumping myself in with another imaginary albeit plausible group of people who have missed the point. And now you may ask the question, "What is the point?"

The point is this. Training somebody to do something is hard, or it is work, and it is even (very possibly) hard work. This is as true of training children as it is of training adults. People talk about how hard it is for a new military recruit to go through basic training, but they never talk about how hard it is to train. Let me divert myself by using an example that may or may not relate to this previous example but probably relates well to the topic at hand.

Children.

When you potty train a kid it's not easy. For the first part of the program you are constantly reminding the child that they need to go to the bathroom in a furious attempt to get them onto the toilet when they actually do need to use it. (I just found out that the word utilize is only appropriate when you are using something for a purpose other than what it was intended for, for all other cases use the word use.) And when they finally do sit on the pot and a tinkling sound comes from the depths below their bottom we have to pretend to be ultimately more excited than we actually are. High fives and streamers mix with "huzzahs!" and "Big Girl/Boy!" that we don't really mean. We are excited, but we generally don't ever show that amount of enthusiasm for any accomplishment except maybe when a large boulder falls from the sky and crushes our car and we barely manage to pull everyone to safety when lightning strikes the tree next to us and lightning creatures emerge and we all work together on a plan to defeat the lightning creatures and save the world. And even then we are just as likely to cry as to laugh and cheer (unless of course we are in a sit com, then we all have a good laugh to lighten the mood and cut to the credits or commercial (more likely the commercial because the network wants us to be in a good mood to buy whatever it is they're advertising so that the advertiser will continue to buy more time on their network until we all stop watching television and only buy the season dvds for television shows that we actually want to watch and producers start advertising madly a-la "The Truman Show") but we're not in a sitcom). And it is far less likely to encourage our children to go potty in the toilet again if we burst into tears, even tears of joy, every time they make pee pee in the potty. And we do this for weeks, and months even only to have them relapse and pee on themselves all over again two months after we think they're finished.

However, we put ourselves through this ordeal because we don't want to keep changing diapers until they turn eighteen and they're old enough to change their own diapers.

And that's why we train. But it's not easy on either party. The military trainer has to put up a front of being the meanest SOB ever to walk this earth until the new recruits finally measure up and then trainer can shake their hands one time before going off to face a new group of noobs who don't have any idea how to do things the right way. Over and over again we put ourselves through training because we see the end goal as desirable.

But we have to choose what habits we want to cultivate. I have a friend who washes their son's hands with a cloth after every meal. When that son comes over to our house he has no idea how to wash his own hands, but he wants them clean. The parents just decided that it wasn't yet worth the effort to have their son wash his own hands (which makes sense because most kids end up not washing their hands so you have wet mess and dirty fingerprints all over for a week which brings up the point of proper training). But this kid eats his dinner. No matter what mom and dad put in front of him, he eats all of it. My kids wash their own hands, but if you put something green in front of them they act as if a boulder had just crushed their car and etc.

So, training is hard. Pick the right things to train your children in (like reading, respecting other people, telling the truth, etc.) and figure out how to train them correctly and all of our problems are solved.

Really.

All of them.

Every single one.

Even problems with rhyme schemes and internal plot structure and coherence in poetry and movies respectively.

No more problems.

You're welcome.