Parenting Tools

Our daughter has a creative and very independent mind. She has a counter proposal for everything we ask her to do. "Put on your shoes"; "First, I'll pull up my socks, then I'll put on my shoes." "We're going to eat lunch, an then you'll take a nap"; "We'll eat lunch, play a game of Uno, an then I'll take a nap." Luckily, she also believes in the infallibility of her parents. We've parlayed this last trait, and her penchant for hearing new stories, to our advantage.

We often have a hard time convincing our daughter to finish her dinner. She is always "full" long before her dinner is complete, yet always asks for and has room for dessert (she takes after her father). Things got easier the night I started pulling coins out of her ears. She started asking me to pull coins from her ears all the time. Many times, I didn't have any coins in pockets, and she would walk away disappointed. I started telling her they needed time to grow. At night, I would leave a coin under her pillow, as if it had finished growing at night and fallen out. Every morning, she started looking for coins under her pillow and wanted to know why none were there if we had forgotten. I explained that it depended on what she ate the prior day. If she ate healthy - vegetables, fruits, grains - they grew, if she eats too much chocolate or sweets, they don't grow. Now, she eats healthy and will turn down dessert....of course, I have to leave a coin under her pillow every night.

For now, this doesn't cost me anything because she always gives the coins to me and I just reuse them. When she starts saving them, it could get expensive. My wife keeps asking me for my exit strategy. I've given it some thought. I think she'll likely tell someone at school, and that person will tell her it's fake and she'll ask me about it. My response will be that it only works for those who believe it, and that it only works for kids under 4. Hopefully that works.

My daughter is also a daredevil. Completely fearless. In some situations, her bravery is admirable. In others, it is downright scary for us. Singapore has a riverwalk. The start of the walk is just outside our apartment building and it continues down to our favorite restaurant. Our daughter started climbing the rails at the edge of the water. To prevent her from falling in, I told her the story of the "river people" who get very mad when people get too close to the river or fall in. In short, the people who lived upriver polluted the water for the people downriver, and, as punishment, were sentenced to be guardians of the river forever. Now, our daughter stays away from the river and always points out when she sees their heads, or when she sees the bubbles that occur when they breathe. She isn't scared of the river people - quite the contrary, she really wants to see them. She also doesn't go near the river anymore.

Finally, drawing on my childhood literary memories of the Big Friendly Giant (BFG) by Roald Dahl, I told my daughter the story of the giants who roam the streets at night and blow dreams into the rooms of children. I took a bit of license by extending the story to say that children who behave are given good dreams, and children who misbehave are given bad dreams. For the most part, this has proven quite effective. If she starts to act up, I just mention she'll get a bad dream, and she calms down. Of course when she has a nightmare after being good all day, I have tough questions to answer. We don't dwell on this story so much anymore, though she still remembers it.

Some of you may be thinking that tricking our kids is inappropriate or will lead to mistrust in the future. I used to think that, too, and had planned on not introducing Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy as a result. Then I saw the joy on my daughter's face when Santa Claus brought her a toy airplane. We use Santa for behavior modification, but it's only effective in December. Coins, the river people and dream delivering giants achieve behavior modification daily.

Maybe I'm being lazy by using tricks. Maybe it would be better if I baked broccoli into brownies like the best selling cookbook recommends - that seems to be an appropriate level of trickery. All I know is it works, and my daughter wakes up every morning excited to find coins under her pillow like it is the first time it has ever happened, and walks along the river have become journeys of discovery and hunts for the river people. Those are side effects I can live with.