Chapter 14

Rules Are Rules (Unless They’re Hard to Enforce)

Kids are jerks and do bad things. Everybody knows that. Yet if you don’t discipline them, people will blame you for all the bad stuff they do anyway. Nobody will give you or your child the benefit of the doubt. That garage didn’t burn itself down. Unless it’s a coincidence your kid smells like lighter fluid.

For whatever reason, parent shaming is intensely concentrated in the area of discipline. If your kid does poorly in school, no one will say you’re a bad tutor. If your kid is afraid of the dark, no one will say you’re a substandard monster-killer. But if your kid destroys the garage in a firestorm worthy of the Great Fire of London, suddenly it’s your fault for being too soft. Apparently a longer time-out would’ve been the difference between good behavior and arson. Now you know.

The Most Devastating Fires in History

While bare minimum mums and dads shrug off that kind of parent shaming, overachieving parents cannot. To them, everything their child does—their successes, their failures, their misguided experiments with combustible material—belongs to mum and dad. A misbehaving child makes the whole family look bad, and that burns more than a thousand garage fires. Children are supposed to be trainable. If you can teach a dog not to pee in the house, surely you can train a kid not to start a fire in a detached garage.

Except raising a child is less like training man’s best friend and more like herding angry bulls. You’ll never stop them, but maybe you can poke them with a sharp stick to make them rampage in a different direction. Just steer them down the path where they’ll cause the least damage and try not to get trampled. Oh, and invest in a good carpet cleaner.

Once you accept that you’ll never have a well-behaved child, the aims of bare minimum discipline become clearer. Get your kid to respect the rules enough that they can hold down a job someday. Prevent their youthful indiscretions from sparking a life of crime. And apply just enough discipline that, if their life goes up in flames, you’re protected from blame. Ultimately, the goal of bare minimum discipline isn’t to change your child’s behavior. It’s to make it seem like you’re trying. You don’t want your adult child to be able to say they have a criminal record because you let them get away with murder. If your kid asks you to help them move a body, politely decline. You have back problems.

As long as you make an effort to discipline your child—even if it’s a bare minimum one—you can claim that nothing that happens afterward is your fault. When other parents look at you askew after yet another mysterious garage fire, you can shrug and say, “I sort of tried.” Then you’re off the hook.

The Penalty Box

If you want to maximize the illusion of discipline while minimizing effort, start with a time-out. Mums and dads have used this tactic for thousands of years, though with mixed results. Philip II of Macedon once put his son Alexander in time-out for taking a toy. Alexander reacted by taking most of Asia. But Mahatma Gandhi’s parents also put their son in time-out, and he grew up to be one of the most selfless people ever to live. I’m guessing in both these cases, but I’ve never heard of a child NOT having a time-out, so the odds are on my side. If you have evidence to the contrary, don’t tell my publisher.

The biggest flaw with time-outs is they depend on the honor system. After you put your kid on a chair in the corner, they have to stay there of their own free will. If they get up, the whole system collapses. You can’t give them a second time-out. They’ll just keep walking away until you end up hyperventilating by yourself in the dark. When you’re a parent, every cupboard is a panic room.

But don’t schedule that crying session just yet. As a last resort, you can try these tricks to keep your kid in place and make them think you’re trying:

• Vague threats: Promise something worse will happen if your kid doesn’t stay in the time-out chair. They don’t know what that something is, and neither do you. Then hope the fear of the unknown will keep them from calling your bluff.

• An obstacle course: Take the scattered debris your child left around the house and use it to surround the chair. The resulting defensive barriers could stop a tank.

• Rope: I think this is illegal. That’s usually the case with things that work.

• The Tom Sawyer: Convince your kid it’s fun to sit in the time-out chair. Although if it’s fun, it defeats the purpose of the punishment. Scratch that plan.

• Checkout time: Give yourself a time-out. It won’t teach your kid anything, but it’s a great chance for you to take a nap. Why punish your kid when you can reward yourself instead?

All of these approaches require at least some work from you, except the nap one. You can do that one in your sleep. But if you prefer a lazier approach (and if you don’t, you’re most of the way through the wrong book), you might try this next method.

Go Away

You can’t always focus on the long game. Yes, you want to use discipline to make your child a better-behaved human being. But sometimes the best you can hope for is to put out fires. Literally. There won’t be a garage left standing by the end of this chapter.

If you just want to solve the immediate problem, eliminate its source: your child. I don’t mean kill them. You’ve put in too much work to simply throw it all away like that, even doing the bare minimum. But you can remove your child from the picture for a while. Out of sight, out of mind, out of range of nearby garages.

Rather than corralling your child in a corner, banish them to their room. You can’t stop them from being bad, but you can make them go be bad somewhere else. You want discipline, but you’ll settle for quiet. Silence conquers all.

The bedroom is a problematic banishment site because that’s where all your kid’s toys are. Don’t let that stop you. Seriously, where else would you send your child? The kitchen has food, the living room has the TV, and the bathroom is your sanctuary. It’s bad enough that they occasionally defile it with their presence. Don’t let them move in there.

To stop your kid from playing while they’re in trouble, tell them to stay on their bed. For an adult, this would be the ultimate reward. For a kid, it’s capital punishment. Admittedly, if you don’t check on them, they’ll just sneak off their bed to play with all their cool stuff. Let them. They won’t want to get caught, so they’ll play quietly. Mission accomplished.

The Best Places to Exile Your Kid

Location	Pro	Con
Their Room	They might finally play with all those expensive toys you bought them.	They’ll still say they’re bored.
Your Room	It’s away from the main living area.	They’ll snoop around. Make sure that one drawer is locked.
The Loft	They’ll survive flooding.	You won’t.
The Garage	They’ll be isolated.	That’s how this whole mess started.
The Garden	You won’t see them.	Your neighbors will.
The Streets	They can say they grew up there.	They’ll never stop saying it.
Another Country	It’s total banishment.	It requires six months of planning for a passport.
The Moon	In space, no one can hear you whine.	Transportation may be pricey.

Grounded

If sending your kid away won’t work, keep them close instead. In the traditional form of grounding, you keep your kid home, allowing them to leave only for a job or school. It’s like work release from prison, only your kid doesn’t have an ankle monitor. Those cost extra.

The downsides of grounding are obvious. If your kid is being awful, the last thing you want is to keep them around. You’re the one who’s really being punished. Your kid may recognize this and act out. Do you have the resolve to outlast them? You’re a bare minimum parent. The answer is no.

Rather than keeping your child with you, you could ground them from something other than leaving the house, like screen time. Last chapter, you saw the extensive benefits of letting your kid glue themselves to the TV. Banning them from it will hurt your kid, but it will hurt you more. They’ll hover around you, sighing heavily to express their despair. But no matter how much they complain, being grounded won’t kill them—even if, after a while, you wish it would. At least then the whining would stop.

If your kid doesn’t like TV shows or video games, you can still ground them, but you’ll have to get creative. For introverted children who love learning, the only meaningful things you can ban them from are books. Though if that’s your kid’s only interest, it raises the question of how they got grounded in the first place. Maybe they read disrespectfully. You can see it in their eye movements. If you have to ground your kids from books, you’re doing a good job as a parent. Too good. Make your kid watch TV or something. Nobody likes a showoff.

Top Things to Ground Your Kid From

What’s Banned	Pro	Con
Riding Bikes	Can’t speed off to cause trouble.	Will cause trouble at home.
Dessert	There’s more for you.	There will be more of you.
A Favorite Toy	You’ll have a valuable hostage.	Your kid might stage a rescue. Hide the grappling hooks.
TV	You can watch whatever you want.	While you’re distracted, your kid could find other garages.
Their Phone	Your kid will stop talking to their friends.	They’ll start talking to you.
Sports	You won’t have to drive them to practices and games.	Your kid will drive you insane.
Music	You won’t have to listen to it blasting through the house.	Your kid will sing it to you instead.
Friends	It cuts off access to troublemakers.	Your kid is trouble incarnate.

Hard Labor

If you’re motivated—which you aren’t—you can punish your kid with extra chores. The problem is that chores are things that need to be done. If you punish your kid by making them do the laundry, you’re really punishing yourself by forcing your family to wear poorly washed clothes. Have fun looking homeless.

There aren’t any important chores you can trust a child to do well. In fact, not doing chores might be what you grounded them for in the first place. If you make them redo the chores they neglected, your clothes won’t just be dirty; they’ll be burning in a ditch. This chapter has more fire than I expected. Kids are terrifying.

Public Humiliation

The downside of punishing your kid by putting them in timeout or grounding them from their tablet is that it won’t earn you any praise from other adults. If loose acquaintances can’t validate your parenting decisions, what’s the point?

Enter public humiliation. Instead of addressing the problem in a mature and thoughtful manner, some parents make their kid wear a humiliating sign and stand on a street corner to show the world. Of course, the world in this case is just a few hundred cars traveling by at high speeds. Passing motorists won’t teach your kid a lesson. Drivers hate two things: reading and helping.

The real impact of sign shaming only hits home once you post the pictures online. That’s when millions of stationary people will have a chance to read the sign and appreciate your parenting brilliance. Or tear you apart for being a terrible person. Either way, lots of people will see what you did, and that’s the point. If you don’t have an audience, did you even parent?

As a bare minimum parent, avoid this form of discipline at all costs. It’s too much work. You have to drive to the shop, buy posterboard, and write a message that’s witty, succinct, and legible. Then you have to proofread the sign a thousand times to make sure there aren’t any spelling errors. Otherwise you’re the one being publicly humiliated.

Your child will experience enough humiliation in life without you piling on. In fact, too much shame could backfire. Your kid could be so humiliated that the experience vaccinates them against feeling shame for the rest of their life. Good luck stopping them then. They’ll be invincible.

Listen Up

The biggest advantage you have over your child in the realm of discipline is your vocabulary. Use it. Explain to your kid what they did wrong and why it’s unacceptable. Build an irrefutable argument. Gesticulate wildly. Include graphs and charts. Then sit back and watch your child ignore everything you just said. Lectures as a form of discipline have numerous advantages. Effectiveness isn’t one of them.

The upside of being ignored is you won’t have to think of a new lecture each time. No matter how many times you repeat yourself, your kid won’t hear a word you say. You’ll always have a fresh audience. And if all forms of discipline are equally ineffective, you might as well do the one that’s easiest for you. Saying things is easier than doing them. Plus it gives you the moral authority to say “I told you so” when your kid screws up. Then their mistakes are their fault, not yours. Deflecting blame is a hallmark of good parenting.

What Lecture Clichés Really Mean

Phrase	Meaning
Grow up.	Be dead inside like me.
When I was your age . . .	I don’t remember anything from back then, but here’s a morality tale I made up.
I hate repeating myself.	But that won’t stop me.
You’re better than this.	We both know you aren’t.
I’m disappointed in you.	You can’t disappoint me. My expectations are too low.
What don’t you understand?	You understand. You’re just a jerk.
We’ll get through this together.	If I left you on someone’s doorstep, they’d give you back.
I love you.	I wish you were a puppy.

The Disappointed Sigh

Legend has it that some parents can stop their child dead in their tracks simply by exhaling. With a single sigh, these Jedi of child-rearing can make their kid feel overwhelmed with guilt. As a parent, you carry that feeling every second of every day. Let your kid carry your emotional baggage for a while.

For a disappointed sigh to teach your child a lesson, your kid has to care what you think of them. If you figure out how to make that happen, let me know. Also, you have to forgo all other disciplinary techniques. You can’t banish your child to their room and then sigh. Your kid won’t hear you huffing three rooms away.

Sorry, Not Sorry

The discipline methods I’ve outlined here might not work, but that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. The only way you can truly fail as a bare minimum parent is if you don’t discipline your child at all. Unless you try too hard. That always means you lose.

The most likely disciplinary outcome is that your kid will pretend to be sorry. Eventually, your child will answer to someone with real power—a manager, a judge, a mafia godfather who makes them an offer they can’t refuse—and that feigned remorse could save their life. Your seemingly futile disciplinary efforts might turn your child into a functional employee or prevent them from going to jail or getting killed. By at least attempting to discipline them, you’re teaching them vital survival skills they can use for the rest of their life. If you do that, they can’t blame you for anything. Well, they can, but they shouldn’t.

Of course, it’s possible discipline isn’t your child’s problem at all. Maybe they’re not a monster. Maybe they’re just hungry. Preheat the oven. It’s time to give your kid something else to complain about.