Soap or Consequence

Recently I finished reading a delightful children’s book written by an author/poet friend of mine, Dicy McCullough, titled "Tired Of My Bath." It’s a wonderful story of a little boy, John Allen, who did not want to take his bath and his mother warned him of the consequences. And guess what? The kid experienced consequences!

I was amazed that the concept of allowing a child to suffer for his/her own actions was still considered. I swooned twice before finishing the book.

These days, parents scramble to remove all obstacles that might hinder their child from experiencing the world and reality. I was raised on secondary smoke, beans and rice. These days, a guest who smokes is sent to the backyard like a convicted sex offender --- can’t have Johnny inhale anything stronger than his mom’s Yankee Candle.

If a kid misbehaves, parents desperately thumb through reference books on child-rearing for the correct reaction to “when siblings express themselves." It’s all about feeling good instead of learning responsibility. My mom would cut to the chase and whack the daylights out of you. I’m loaded with responsibility.

Today, children are raised in the Home of Free Expression where discipline is rationalized away and kids are served fast food eight out of seven days a week (yeah, I did the math and I stand firm). Children are coddled to the state of an invalid and are rarely held to standards or made to suffer consequences. In my day it was wrong to treat a child as a helpless thing.

When I was a kid instead of padding they had rocks under the city jungle gym sets. You learned to hang on.

They didn’t have safety belts on swings because the whole point of swinging was to see how high you could launch yourself upward, toward the sun --- in free flight. Sometimes you landed on your shoulder or arm. You went to the emergency room just as soon as your mom went outside to hang the wash and found you flopping around like a fish.

Emergency rooms kept suckers to give you as soon as the doctor finished constructing your arm cast. Nobody was hyper; spankings took care of that, so it was OK to have the sugar.

We parachuted off the corners of our houses with pillow cases and tied towels to our back to act as capes (like Superman) and learned for ourselves that you cannot fly, no matter how loud you scream “Geronimo!”

We threw dirt clogs and nails at each other, there was no such thing as sunblock, we played with BB guns because they could hurt you. We’d take turns shooting each other in the rear-end to see who would squeal first.

We blew up model airplanes with M-80s and our metal Tonka toys had cadmium in them. One time I swallowed a small plastic Roy Rogers canteen and my mother still made me eat my vegetables --- to this day I’ve never received any counseling.

We rode our bicycles without helmets directly into traffic and built go-carts out of scrap wood and we drove those into traffic too. We soon learned the first name of every traffic officer. It was “Sir?”

We played outside on the grass and invented games, and sometimes we got mad and settled things with fights and wrestling. Then we’d get over it and go play army and shoot each other with sticks for machine guns.

But at day’s end our mothers would always make us take a bath because if you didn’t there were consequences --- and no one wanted anymore of those. Here’s to you, John Allen.