Pride. . . or Punishment?
by Gary Drevitch
Sometimes, your kids do things so beyond the pale that the punishments are clear. Hit your sister? Imperil the baby? Throw food? Time out for the first offense, loss of a privilege for subsequent offenses. But sometimes, one of them will do something that, although you know you ought to punish them for it, also makes you step back and, at some level, admire what they’ve accomplished. I file these under the category of Pride . . . or Punishment.
The classic example for me occurred two years ago during the major-league playoffs, when I was tuned into every televised Red Sox game, but my then-four-year-old son was supposed to be in bed. So why, then, did he come out to the living room an hour-and-a-half after bedtime one night to ask if I had seen a home run? Because he’d located the game on the set in his room and had been watching it with the sound muted, until his enthusiasm for the Sox got the better of him and he rushed out to inadvertently turn himself in. So, would it be Pride. . . or Punishment? Are you kidding? Pride. This was the 21st century equivalent of listening to the game on the transistor radio under your covers. I just smiled and told him to “go back to bed.”
More recently, that now six-year-old son impressively taught himself how to play Texas Hold ‘Em on the GameBoy cartridge an uncle had (regrettably) given him. However, he then secretly plotted to sneak the GameBoy into his bed by hiding it under the stepstool his sister uses to reach the sink in their bathroom. I uncovered his plan, although I had to admit it was creative. Pride. . . or Punishment? Punishment: Loss of the GameBoy for three days (and some Hold ‘Em practice for Dad).
Then, just last week, hitting baseballs near his sister’s elementary school, he popped a foul ball over the fence between the playground and the school building. I was ready to write off the ball, but he insisted he could get around the fence and fetch it. I told him not to try, but he ignored me and he ran off, climbed one section of fence, crawled under another, and retrieved the ball. All in all, a pretty good display of agility. Still, I had told him not to. Was it Pride. . . or Punishment? A draw. I thanked him for the ball, but told him he needed to listen to me in the future. If he did it again, we’d leave the playground immediately.
And then I looked around to see if any of the other dads had seen how well he had scaled that fence.
Gary Drevitch is a former assigning editor at Teen People, Parade Publications, and Scholastic. He’s also a dad with three young kids. A veteran producer of educational content for McGraw-Hill, Scholastic Inc., and Time Inc., he’s written several non-fiction books for children.
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