10 Lessons I Never Thought I’d Have to Teach my Kids

Parenting is a strange endeavor. Without any instruction, testing or training we are thrust into a foreign land and entrusted to take on the most challenging and consequential work of our lives. I knew from the beginning I would occasionally fail, but I hoped more often than not I would meet with success. I knew I wouldn’t always have the answers but believed I would be able to figure things out along the way. I knew I would be the primary teacher in my children’s lives and understood my role as their model and guide. I was prepared for the many lessons that lay ahead. At least the usual stuff. Shapes, colors, numbers, the English language. And as they grew, older how to swim or tie a shoe or ride a bike.

But there are a few things I never expected I would have to teach.

Here they are:

1. How to play. (Many days my kids seem to have forgotten that instinctive quality inherent in all young, and without specific and direct instruction from me they seem not to know how to play.)
2. How to exit the shower, a step-by-step guide. (First, open the curtain on the side of the shower that has the bath mat in front of it. Next, step onto the bath mat. Bath mats were created expressly for this purpose and were developed to prevent bathroom flooding by collecting the excess water pouring off one’s body. Finally, towel dry. You are now ready to move on to the dressing phase.)
3. How wearing the same outfit two consecutive days in a row is not condoned by civilized society.
4. How bathing is a good thing. (I thought kids were supposed to like baths.)
5. How boots with shorts is not an acceptable look. I don’t care if Lady Gaga’s mother lets her do it.
6. How new outfit = new underwear, the two go hand-in-hand. (Replacing underwear daily is a commonly accepted practice.)
7. How I am not your friend. I am your mother. (I literally had to say these words to my daughter. She was unaware.)
8. How I have no special extra-sensory powers in reading the temperature. (I have had the experience of standing outside with The Kid when she asks me what the weather is going to be like. I have responded, “Exactly like this.”)
9. How when you are cold wearing clothing will help. (I have also had the experience of having my children dress themselves in t-shirts on winter mornings only to tell me they are cold. My response: Put some clothes on.)

I also never thought I’d have to provide a step by step tutorial on hand washing especially after my children had long since passed the potty-training stage. It seems lessons instilled with care and urgency early on fade over time. Without reinforcement these lessons, which you worked so hard to engrain into those little heads, lie fallow. These lessons need to be reintroduced regularly, perhaps on an annual or bi-annual basis. I discovered this quite by accident one day when my son used the bathroom and I witnessed something terrifying.

Having washed their hands independently for years, my children never aroused much suspicion upon using the bathroom. But one day after my son went to the bathroom I happened to see him washing his hands through a crack in the door (he sometimes likes to leave the door ajar). While it seems I should be happy Crazy followed proper bathroom protocol, it’s what happened next that really concerns me. He squirted a fair amount of soap into the palm of his hand and then proceeded to rinse the whole thing right down the drain. He stuck his hands under the running water and rinsed the white, little mound of bubbles off before any of it touched the rest of his hand or any part of the other hand. Did I really have to explain to him that washing your hands means you actually have to wash your hands? Merely squirting soap does not constitute washing.

Apparently I did.

And that concludes today’s lesson. Join me again tomorrow for another fascinating look into the perplexing world of raising children.

(This post first ran on One Funny Motha)

About the author: Stacey is the mastermind behind the humor blog, One Funny Motha, a site she sees as a refuge for rational people. Predicated on the belief that parenting is not nor ever should be an extreme sport, One Funny Motha provides incisive cultural commentary, also known as common sense. Her work has appeared on such sites as The Huffington Post, BlogHer, Scary Mommy and Mamalode, and in 2014 she was named one of the Top 10 Funny Parent Bloggers of the Year by Voice Boks. Perhaps most importantly, she is the proud founder of the Detached Parenting Movement, a child-rearing model she single handedly developed without any guidance or advanced degrees in child psychology. The woman’s a genius. Find her running her mouth on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and, of course, her blog.