When I–and the many talented writers here–embarked on this project, the question was this: would dads be interested in reading/sharing thoughts about fatherhood when they were ‘off the clock.’

The answer is: no.

And I don’t say that in a sad or bitter way. It’s just a fact of modern man. We take care of the kid(s) for a few hours on the weekend or at night and we are exhausted. The last thing we’re going to do is read about fatherhood with our last bits of remaining energy. It explains why there’s an abundance of motherhood blogs (many of them thriving), and so few fatherhood blogs.

Don’t get me wrong: a lot of good has come out of this multi-year experiment. I got to process a lot of feelings (!) leading up to and after the birth of my first child. Better yet, I got to work with amazing writers who I consider talented not only with the written word, but conjuring up something important to say.

I can’t thank enough these proud dads who shared their wry observations:

- Dan Beeby (for content and web-mastery)

- Matt Winkler (for keeping it going as long as it did)

- Mike Rehfus (for some of the funnier posts)

- Matt Ledoux (for getting in trouble with one of his entries)

- Rob Curtis (for gear reviews and support)

- Chris Belden (for being an amazing tiger father writer)

- Brian Hoover (for his astute insights and “being ready”)

I just read a CNN blog post by Jeff Pearlman encouraging dads to “wake the hell up.” Surprisingly, I agree with every point he makes. Especially the one about dads golfing for five hours on weekends after being gone all week for work. That may be an unpopular opinion among dads, but shit, we have to pull our weight. Turns out many of us dads aren’t doing our fair share and thus probably don’t deserve that gift mug this father’s day.

Below is an excerpt from the story, but I encourage you to read the full text here.

Really, wake the hell up. Now. I understand that most of you have 9-to-5 jobs, that you leave tired and come home tired and just wanna chill in front of SportsCenter with a bowl of chips. But, seriously, you have no remote idea: Being a stay-at-home parent is exhausting. At the office, you can hide. You can take lunch. You can pretend you’re working while scrolling the Internet for Yankees-Blue Jays and, ahem, Lindsay Lohan news. You have genuine social interactions with folks over the age of, oh, 12. People ask questions about your day — and listen to the answers.I

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no “perfect dad” and I would never claim or try to be. However, I do my damnedest to make sure that many of the child-rearing responsibilities are shared. Yeah, it’s hard as hell. And do I always want to be doing these things (changing diapers, going to the park, etc.), no, I don’t. But when we as fathers admit that there’s more we could do, that’s a start. I, for one, will try to get up with my child in the morning on more days so my wife can get some extra Zs. Guess I’m taking this whole “wake the hell up” thing literally.

by regular contributor Brian Hoover

Newborns come with “stuff,” you’ve no doubt realized. Boppys and Bumbos and Soothies and Pack ’n Plays; blankets and onesies and bottles and books. Don’t even get me started on breast pumps and everything those entail.

When we brought our daughter home, my wife and I found ourselves thrust into an all-fronts war with “stuff” that we’d never anticipated, even as the spoils from the baby shower accumulated alongside the gifts that other gracious folks had sent. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful; quite to the contrary, we were blessed by this extraordinary show of generosity from family, friends, and colleagues. It’s just that we had, until then, lived a relatively simple, mostly clutter-free existence. Now we had more stuff than we could manage with our combined four hands.

Which got us thinking.

We were often asked by friends who were expecting what we thought was essential: Do we need the video monitor, or will a regular monitor do? Do we need a monitor at all? During one such conversation with a friend, my wife was asked what product, if she could choose just one, she felt would be the most helpful thing for a new parent to own.

Without missing a beat, she replied, “Robotic third arm.”

This had been a matter of regular conversation in our house since very nearly the beginning of our tenure as parents. What could be more useful than a third arm? Consider:

You have a wailing, hungry baby on your shoulder who will only cry harder if you put him down. Preparing a bottle is a two-handed task and your partner is not home—Help!

Robotic Third Arm™ is ready to assist.

At the changing table, your kid’s diaper is filled with “banana soup,” and you realize you forgot to refill the wipes after the last change. The refills are across the room, and but you can’t leave the baby unattended, even for two seconds. What to do?

Try Robotic Third Arm with Extension Fingers™.

You’re holding a sleeping baby in one arm, rubbing her forehead in that way that for whatever reason is the only thing that keeps her asleep—Man, she’s beautiful and all, but how are you supposed to read a magazine?

Robotic Third Arm with LED Book Light™ (two AA batteries not included).

Twins?

You get the picture.

In order to operate at peak function, I imagine that Robotic Third Arm™ would need to somehow be wired into the user’s brain, but also easily removable for those times when your regular complement of arms is sufficient. In terms of motion and texture, it should be as natural as possible. And, most importantly, prospective manufacturers should always strive to keep the consumer in mind, especially in these uncertain economic times: we’d like to keep the price tag at or under $400,000 per unit. We put families first.

And so petitioning all inventors: We claim the intellectual property rights, but we just don’t have the technological savvy to pull it off alone. Interested parties should kindly leave their information in the comments section beneath this post, and I’ll be happy to be in touch regarding formal proposals. On behalf of parents everywhere, I thank you.

And, parents everywhere—You’re welcome.

Now I know most dads idea of cooking for their kid means pre-heating the oven to 450 for a batch of Fish Styx, but if you cook and cook well for your kids, the new food site foodrepublic.com wants to hear about it. Just enter a comment with what you cook for a chance to win the book “Man with a Pan.”

One dad actually pounds out chicken breasts and uses cookie cutters to make dinosaur shapes and breads them. Take that you lazy bastards.

As an adult, I’ve long since been robbed of my innocence. So I’m really not one who should be listening too closely to the children’s music we play for our kid. Last weekend, I was clearly not in the mood to accept the kind of fantasies the musicians offered up to my son’s pristine ears. Because kids, despite what people tell you, not everything in your imagination is possible. Nor should it be.

Case in point, Laura Doherty’s Wiggleworm tune:”If All of the Raindrops.” Ready? Let’s play:

If all of the raindrops were lemondrops and gumdrops

Oh what a rain that would be.

I’d stand outside with my mouth open wide,

singing ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah (etc.)

If rain were replaced by lemondrops and gumdrops and our children opened their mouths to catch all that corn syrupy sweetness, they’d be more obese than we already are. Not to mention a sweeping epidemic of sewer rat obesity. After all, where do you think that sweet rain goes after it falls to the ground? Sewers, that’s where. And if water was replaced with candy, just imagine trying to flush a toilet filled with gumdrops.

In the second verse, the song gets even more treacly, if that was even possible:

If all of the snowflakes were chocolate bars and milkshakes

Oh what a snow that would be.

I’d stand outside with my mouth open wide,

singing ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah (etc.)

Not only would chocolate bars and milkshakes make piss-poor substitutes for snow, they would be damn near impossible to ski on. So long winter sports! Sorry future winter Olympians, your dreams of sporting glory have been dashed by Ms. Doherty’s imagination. Not only that, but can you imagine what the spring run-off would look like? Streams and rivers made of dirty chocolate and spoiled milkshakes. Disgusting.

If all of the sunbeams were lemonade and ice cream

Oh what a sun that would be.

Because I’d stand outside with my mouth open wide,

singing ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah (etc.)

If sunbeams were lemonade and ice cream, every bit of plant life would cease to exist. Try photosynthesis with a scoop of Chunky Monkey. Not going to work. So nice job, Ms. Doherty: now that you’re done with your song, our entire world is dead. And obese.

I ranted all of the above Dennis Miller-style to my 11 month old. Good thing he didn’t understand any of it.

What children’s song lyrics drive you around the bend?

by regular contributor Chris Belden

I’ve been a vegetarian for 20 years. I don’t eat meat of any kind—no beef, pork, poultry or fish. No lobster, no chicken soup, no turkey at Thanksgiving—nothing with a face, nothing with a mother. I don’t do this for health reasons. If I were interested in health I would exercise more and drink less. I do it for ethical reasons. This is not the forum to discuss this topic, but suffice it to say that I don’t feel it’s necessary to kill animals to survive. Anyone interested in my reasons for not eating meat can read books such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s recent Eating Animals, or just Google “slaughterhouse video.”

My 4 ½ year-old daughter, Frankie, is also a vegetarian. The flesh of an animal has never passed her lips. When she was born, I asked my wife to honor my wish to bring Frankie up this way, knowing full well that, some day, she will probably be out with a friend at the mall and eat a slice of pepperoni pizza, and that will be the end of her vegetarianism. But I wanted to try. (My wife, by the way, is not a veggie. She eats poultry on occasion, though she never cooks it at home.)

When people learn that I’m a vegetarian, they always ask the same question: How do you get your protein? My answer is simple: I eat what my body craves, trusting my system to know what it needs. If I’m low on protein, I crave beans, or peanut butter, or tofu. And so I eat it. I don’t keep track of what I eat, or how much. My health is as good as it can be at my age (50, God help me). My cholesterol is perfect, my blood pressure is on the money, all my blood levels are where they need to be. I’m not low on anything.

When people learn that Frankie is also a vegetarian, they sometimes freak out. She’s a kid! She needs her protein! But according to the American Diatetic Association, which was established in 1917, “well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for all individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence.” Most people are more aware of the recommendations of the USDA, which every once in a while comes up with a new version of the food pyramid. What people don’t realize is that the USDA is not only charged with providing eating guidelines, but also with promoting the food industry. So the recommendations to eat a certain amount of meat, to drink a certain amount of milk, etc.—it’s all tied in to promoting big business.

Frankie loves cheese, yogurt, hard-boiled eggs, and meatless “chicken nuggets,” all jam-packed with protein. Her favorite food in the world is lentil soup, which my wife makes from scratch, and is as good for you as almost anything. Like all kids, she also loves junk—gummy bears, ice cream, anything sweet. We fight the usual battles about this stuff; we just don’t tell her to please eat her bacon at breakfast.

Other than a lingering cold and allergies inherited from my side of the family, my daughter is as healthy as any of her meat-eating pals, and more so than most of them. When we recently had a strep throat scare, her pediatrician noted, with some surprise, that Frankie had not been in to see her since her annual check up, last August. And while I can’t possibly be objective about this, I really think she’s smarter than the average bear. Her teachers concur. If a lack of animal protein has stunted her mental capacity, we see no sign of it.

How does Frankie feel about being a vegetarian? I’ve been continually surprised that she has never requested a chicken finger, or a hamburger, or a hot dog—the products so often foisted on kids at parties, fairs and picnics. When a friend munches on one of those strips of processed chicken, Frankie casually mentions that she doesn’t eat animals and continues to eat her grilled cheese sandwich. No big deal.

I’m not sure how long this will last. That slice of pepperoni pizza is waiting out there for the kid who wants to rebel against her daddy. So are cigarettes, bad boys, beers and tattoos. I can only hope that, when the rebelling is over, she remembers what Albert Einstein once said: “Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”

What are your thoughts on raising kids vegetarian? Do you think it sets them back? Should they be allowed to choose?

by regular contributor Brian Hoover

I got a cryptic e-mail from a college friend the other day saying he wanted to talk. We didn’t really have a talk-on-the-phone kind of friendship, so I wrote him back and told him to give me a call. After catching each other up on our day-to-day stuff, he finally told me why he wanted to get in touch.

As a first-time father of a eighteen-month-old, I’ve been on the advice-seeking end of this kind of conversation more than the advice-dispensing (I can talk a decent game, but I’m as clueless as anyone). But my friend’s question had less to do with any specific act of fatherhood than it did a common but chiefly modern concern: When is the best time to start a family?

Once upon a time, it seems, this question was a nonfactor in our cultural experience. The best time to start a family followed hard upon exchanging vows: You got married, you had kids, you lived in happy pursuit of the American Dream ever after. There are many more paths to parenthood now that we have begun to recognize that the capacity to raise kids does not sit squarely with the white bread nuclear model of generations past.

We have more freedom now to plan our families than we’ve ever had before. With more control over our reproductive destiny, in terms of conception and contraception alike, we can wait until that ultimate state of Readiness arrives. We can wait until we’ve finished that graduate degree, wait until we’ve ditched town for a lawn in the ’burbs. We can wait until our careers are on bedrock and there’s money to burn in the bank. The inclination to say, “We’ll wait to start a family until we’re totally ready” is easy to understand. It’s what my wife and I did; we knew we wanted to expand our family some day, but that some day wasn’t even discussed until we were five years in.

At that point, she and I were 30 and 29, respectively. My wife had finished her master’s and ascended to the chair of her department at school; I had worked my way into the stage actors’ union and had steady income from a variety of performing and teaching gigs. We owned a home—not the house on the cul-de-sac of our wildest fancy, but a decent condo in a respectable school district. We’d scratched out a little bit of a savings, somehow. We were in a good place. We were Ready.

So we decided to go live without a net, so to speak. And it was good. We got pregnancy tests, and when they didn’t show us little blue plusses or whatever they were supposed to do, we kept at it. And it was good. Maybe a little more like work than we’d expected, but good all the same.

All around us, our friends were growing their families. The wedding boom we’d experienced post-college segued into a baby shower boom. We held our old roommates’ infants and imagined what our own would look like, hoping that it would happen for us soon so our kids could all grow up together. Some of our friends were getting pregnant with their seconds, and we remained the couple with the spoiled cat. We started to wonder about ourselves. Was she barren? Was I sterile? Had we screwed up the process by our chemical meddling? Or had we just waited too long after all?

We believed we were Ready, but we hadn’t accounted for difficulties conceiving. We hadn’t accounted for miscarriage once we did conceive. So we took stock, decided to be less aggressive in our pursuit, to let come what may. For every story about the couple who’d gotten pregnant as soon as they’d started trying, there was one about the couple who’d had no luck. Usually, the tales had it, they’d try and try, become stressed and obsessed, and it was only when they eased up or even gave up that they magically conceived. Perhaps that would be our story.

It wasn’t. We fell into a more natural rhythm, and we stayed as childless as we’d always been. We considered getting ourselves tested. We considered alternative fertilization methods, we considered adoption. We considered whether this was all a sign that the Universe had good reason to deprive us of offspring and that we ought not to push it if we had any sense of what was good for us.

When the housing market tanked, we were saddled with a mortgage far in excess of what our condo was worth; our savings meant a lot less in light of that. Acting work was harder to get, and the teaching was starting to wear me down. The future at large started to feel as infertile as the present and so, a bit restless, I applied and was accepted to grad school. It would be a rough couple of years and there would be lots of loans to repay, but we’d survived my wife’s grad days and we’d survive mine. The Readiness of a year or two before had been almost completely compromised, but it was all in the spirit of letting come what may.

We found out we were pregnant just exactly as all this was going on. Obviously.

And so I told my friend, in reply to his question about when’s a good time to start a family, that there is no such earthly thing. You can be Ready, and nature could have other plans. You could be completely Unready, and then it happens. Strike that: No matter when it happens, you will be Unready. The simple fact of the matter is that there is no amount of preparing you can do that will ever adequately equip you for the indescribable extremes of parenting. You are charged with making sure this tiny, helpless thing survives, because without you, it cannot. You love this tiny, helpless thing more than you thought yourself capable, even though it pukes and cries and never lets you get three hours of sleep and lays utter waste to your social life. At 3:30 in the morning, when your infant has a high fever or an erupting incisor, you’re not so much going to care about your 401(k) or how many more payments you have on your Nissan as you will about tending to this tiny, helpless thing so that everybody can get some rest.

Get your ducks in a row, if you like, or don’t—it doesn’t matter. There’s no such thing as the perfect time to start a family. No matter when you decide to start a family, parenthood is going to be the most glorious and god-awful hardest job you’ve ever had, and it will take precedence over everything else. You will do what you have to in order to ensure survival, The End.

I asked my friend on the phone several times, “Am I making any sense?” He assured me I was, but I’m not sure I agree. I talked in circles for forty minutes and I couldn’t seem to put my finger on the right thing to tell him about when to have a family. Frankly, I was worried that I was scaring the shit out of him.

When I told my wife later on about the conversation, she was able to distill it in a way that I couldn’t. “The only requirement for starting a family,” she said, “is wanting to have a family. Everything else will work itself out.”  She didn’t mean that you’ll have to do nothing. No, sir. But if you want to have a family, have a family. There will always be challenges—financial, reproductive, you name it—and you will have a lot of figuring to do along the way.

Just know that Ready is a myth.

This is a bedtime story the likes of which you’ve never seen before, but can definitely relate to. It’s by the brilliant Adam Mansbach. Never has a book hit so close to a parent’s heart. And now, you can see it read by the one, the only, Samuel L. Snakes On a Plane Jackson.

Here’s a sample of the story:

The cats nestle close to their kittens now.
The lambs have laid down with the sheep.
You’re cozy and warm in your bed, my dear.
Please go the fuck to sleep.

Buy your copy today.

by contributor Matt Winkler

Bad Cop:         “[Child], I thought we agreed that you would [perform an action].”

Child:               “Stop micromanaging me! I’m not perfect, OK?”

Good Cop:       “That’s OK this time. But you need to improve, understand?”

Child:               “Fine.” (Child exits, stage left)

Good Cop:       “[Bad Cop], you need to pick your battles. You’re pushing him/her away.”

Bad Cop:         “All three of us agreed that he/she would [perform an action]. Why am I the only one who expects accountability? How else is he/she going to learn responsibility?”

Good Cop:       “You have to be more flexible. It’s not easy being [a number] years old.”

Bad Cop:         “Easy isn’t the point. The child who is always carried never learns to walk. It’s not unreasonable to expect him/her to [perform an action] at this age.”

Good Cop:       “Just let it go.”

Reading the comments on earlier posts sparked a connection between Brian Hoover’s A-B-C chart and the Good Cop, Bad Cop paradigm. The scene above has played out many times during my marriage, invariably ending with me (Bad Cop) in the dog house. My wife and I agree on the laws of our household, but she tends toward selective enforcement, so I try to make my arrests when the good cop is not on duty. This treats the symptoms, but not the disease. How to remedy the performance gap between my wife’s noble legislation and her wimpy adjudication?

Let’s examine the dynamics at play in the scene above, according to the A-B-C formula, which “essentially allows a behavior analyst to identify the causes and outcomes of a given behavior.”

Child:

Antecedent – A three-way agreement that Child would [perform an action]

Behavior – Failed to clean her room, take out the garbage, do his homework, etc.

Consequence – Busted by Bad Cop, absolved by Good Cop

Bad Cop:

Antecedent – Child failed to [perform an action]

Behavior – Verbal confrontation with Child, to hold him/her accountable.

Consequence – Undermined by Good Cop.  Accountability compromised.

Good Cop:

Antecedent – Bad Cop confronting Child

Behavior – Intercede on behalf of Child

Consequence – long term Bad Cop / Child relationship rescued. Accountability incidentally compromised in the process.

Now, what is the function of these behaviors? Brian informs us “that the vast majority…of the behaviors we encounter fall into one of two categories: escape or attention-seeking.” Let’s assume a healthy family dynamic, and the child is simply trying to escape the obligation to [perform an action]. The best explanation for the Bad Cop behavior is child rearing (a combination of duty and altruism?). The Good Cop seeks immediate escape from conflict.

In our household of hair trigger, teenage dramatics, simply broaching a topic qualifies as conflict. My wife’s maternal instinct is to protect her child and restore harmony, so she rushes in to oppose me. In the past, I’ve either folded or held my ground, but I’ve discovered a new tactic that is far more productive. Instead of engaging my wife in a struggle over the issue at hand, I ask, “What would Supernanny say?” This converts the external conflict with me into an internal struggle with her parenting conscience, personified by Jo Frost.

I recommend this approach to other dads who find themselves accused of extremism when taking a centrist position. Rather than arguing your case, just summon an expert witness – one whom your spouse respects. Conjure this wise and imaginary arbiter, and allow your wife to play out the struggle mentally, potentially changing her own mind, and certainly sparing you another trip to the dog house.

by contributor Brian Hoover.

Editor’s Note: Please take a moment to read this longer form piece on child behavior. As a parent, when you think critically about how you respond to your children’s less-than-ideal behavior, you can help reinforce the good kind and reduce the bad kind. Take a few minutes for this, you’ll be glad you did.

Like approximately 900,000 other people over the past two-plus months, I have run across a video on YouTube called “Ellie’s amazing vocabulary pt. 2” or something to that effect. In it, a toddler (Ellie, we’ll assume) is sitting at her high chair with a sippy cup and a bib, rocking a hoodie; a poppy Modest Mouse tune jangles faintly in the background. The clip only runs twenty-seven seconds, but Ellie doesn’t waste a one, uttering a certain two-word phrase that means “the heck with it” (but just a tad saltier) a total of nine times. On screen, she’s a natural. Her diction is fantastic. She glows as she delivers her line directly to the camera, blue eyes bright and wide and searching.

Ellie’s father can be heard from immediately behind the camera: “Don’t say that anymore, okay?” She waves him off with a frustrated whinny and then glares right back at him. She hits him with her line again. And again. And again. Dad warns, “We don’t say that anymore.” And Ellie drops it again. “Ellie—no.” But he ought to concede. He’s lost this one already. She gets one more in before the video cuts off.

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We have a useful tool in my field[1] that helps us determine the function of behavior: the A-B-C Chart. “A-B-C” in this instance stands for Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence; the chart essentially allows a behavior analyst to identify the causes and outcomes of a given (undesirable, usually) behavior so that a plan can be formed to modify (or eliminate) it.

A couple of strictly hypothetical scenarios to help illustrate the point:

Scenario 1: For homework, Roger has a color-by-numbers worksheet. When I ask him to come sit at the table to begin his task, Roger backhands the box of crayons off the table and across the room, scattering them to all corners of the room. I tell Roger he needs to pick up the crayons and put them back in the box.

Scenario 2: As I record data in Roger’s logbook, Roger is trying hard to open a large container that has several of his favorite toys in it. He can’t do it by himself, but knows that if he needs help, all he needs to do is ask me. Roger growls and kicks at and shakes the container as I continue to fill out my paperwork; ultimately he engages in some sustained shouting and turns over a chair. I put down my pen and intervene; Roger stops shouting.

In Scenario 1, the antecedent is my placing a demand on Roger: “Come to the table, Roger, thereby leaving whatever fun thing you’re doing, and do your homework instead, which, I’m going to guess, is near the bottom of your list of things you’d like to do, if it makes the list at all, which, I’m going to guess, it does not.”  The behavior is smacking the crayons across the room, and the immediate consequence is that Roger then has to clean up his mess. In Scenario 2, the antecedent is that Roger wants a toy that he cannot gain access to by himself. The behavior is an honest-to-goodness tantrum, and the consequence is that I come to see just what the deuce is going on here.

So what is the function of the behavior in each scenario?  It might help to know that the vast majority, by which I mean quite nearly all, of the behaviors we encounter fall into one of two categories: escape or attention-seeking. In the first scenario, Roger’s swiping the crayons off the table is an unmistakable attempt to escape the demand. In the second, his tantrum, is designed to get my attention, as evidenced by the fact that it stops once he has it.

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The reaction that Ellie is looking for in her father’s viral fame vehicle is, pretty obviously, I think, laughter. It isn’t difficult to imagine her antics having resulted in laughter once before—she says, “F—k it,” Dad reinforces it with attention (and the best kind of attention at that—laughter and the video camera!) and so she says, “F—k it” again.

But, now, Poor Ellie!  She must be thinking, Wait a minute—where’s my laugh?  What’s with the stern reproach?  This isn’t right. I know—I’ll say it again, and this time, it’ll work like it did before!

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Back to Roger. The “C” portion of the A-B-C Chart is perhaps the most important—what happens in response to a behavior. The consequence is what reinforces the behavior for better or for worse (and ultimately determines whether you’ll see that behavior again). This is worth spending a minute on.

In Scenario 1, the consequence for Roger’s swiping the crayons off the table is that he has to pick up the crayons. But if the behavior was aimed at avoiding his homework, then Roger can fly a big “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” banner above any aircraft carrier in his fleet, ’cause, clearly, he ain’t doing any color-by-numbers worksheet while he’s picking two hundred crayons up off the floor. And in Scenario 2, going all Hulk on the furniture does exactly what it was supposed to do: divert me from what I was doing so I could pay attention to him.

If Roger is picking crayons up off the floor, isn’t he just stalling? Isn’t he winning the battle here because he’s not, in fact, doing his color-by-numbers worksheet? And the tantrum—it was designed to get my attention, and sure enough, I’ve set down my pen and am now dealing with Cyclonic Action Roger.

It’s like my dad used to tell me all those years ago when he taught me how to pitch: you’ve got to make sure you’re following through. The consequence of Roger’s throwing the crayons all over the floor must be two-fold: 1) Throwing your crayons on the floor is an unacceptable response to my asking you to come and do your homework, and so you’re going to need to clean them up; and 2) But, guess what! You still have to do your color-by-numbers sheet first! The consequence of Roger’s tantrum is that I attend to him, but it’s all about the details here. Attending to Roger’s tantrum by opening the container and giving him access to his toys? Bad. Attending to Roger’s tantrum by letting him know that I won’t tolerate his violence, that he needs to restore the furniture to order, and, when he is calm enough to do so, ask me for my help? Better. You’ve got to make sure there’s a meaningful consequence, and you have to make sure you follow through with it.

Here is the part of behaviorism that every parent, guardian, and caregiver, bar none, needs to understand: If the consequence of Roger’s tantrum is that I get his toys out of the box for him (without first taking steps to redirect the behavior as I mention above), then I have just taught Roger that pitching a fit is an effective way for him to get his toys. If the consequence of Roger’s chucking a box full of crayons across the room is that he gets out of doing his homework, then I have just taught Roger that he won’t have to do his work if he makes a huge mess. If your daughter caterwauls in the checkout line because she wants a Kit Kat bar, and you cave and buy her one because it’s embarrassing and you just don’t want to have to hear it anymore, you better believe she’ll remember that if crying worked once, it’d probably work again.

And if Ellie got a great laugh out of Dad by saying “F—k it” that one time, well, why wouldn’t she just see if she couldn’t get a repeat result?

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Lest you think I’m some kind of killjoy, or that I am convinced that I’m this great father myself, let me add this: I think the Ellie video is absolutely hilarious. I’ve watched it a dozen times at least, and it gets me every time. I completely understand her dad’s impulse to get the episode on camera for posterity.

I’ll take my mea culpa one step further: my wife and I have been anxious for our daughter to reach the stage of her language development where she repeats everything we say; we figured there would be a very entertaining month or so where we could make her say all sorts of distasteful things without lasting consequences.

I realize now, in light of the Ellie video and what has very suddenly started happening our own home, that this is folly. At seventeen months, Leslie has what we have been told is a remarkable vocabulary. Among the ways she augments it is by listening to her mother and I as we talk, isolating specific words of interest, and then repeating them. The rapidity of this process has increased by a factor of ten, it seems; she learns new words, plural, on a daily basis, and often with only a few exposures. The word of the day? “Disaster.” As in, “They’re saying North Carolina had several hundred tornadoes over the weekend—what a disaster,” or, “Can you load the dishwasher? The kitchen is a disaster,” or, “If you don’t take a nap this afternoon, you’re going to be a disaster.” I guess it’s a word we’ve thrown around a bit, and Leslie has caught on. She stands in the middle of the living room, surrounded by what looks like every toy on earth, shrugging and saying, “Disaster!” (It actually sounds like “disasshole,” but we’ll leave that one alone for now.)

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There is also something to be said for picking your battles. Sometimes it is just easier to buy your kid the Kit Kat and call it even. I totally get that. I’ve had my cave-ins, for sure, and I’ve reinforced behaviors I almost instantly wished I hadn’t. It happens.

Ellie’s dad wrote a lengthy introduction to the clip on YouTube, defending his parenting from the internet trolls and shedding some light on the circumstances that led to his eighteen-month-old’s rant. In it he states, “If I were a perfect parent (and who is?) I should have ignored it.”  (Correct. That, we call putting the behavior “on extinction”—but that’s a lesson for another day.)  He concludes by saying that there are many ways to raise a successful family, but that “Love is the only requirement.”

And I’m inclined to agree with that.

But knowing my A-B-Cs has been a big help so far, too.

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* Since 2003, I have worked as a behavior therapist for children on the autistic spectrum. I want to stress, however, that the behavioral concepts I discuss herein can be applied to just about anything on earth that exhibits behavior.