Dead Rebel Society - Gospels Of Grace - School Of Parental Bliss

Welcome to another class on how to properly raise your children without attracting the attention of the CPS.

Class 5: Crime & Punishment

Aaahh… Crime and punishment – my favorite subject thus far in this ongoing School of Parental Bliss. Be honest; don’t you get a certain amount of satisfaction from making the lower lips of little children quiver in fear and remorse? Of course you do – if you say otherwise you’re a goddamn liar, and a bad parent.

Most parents feel that they are already on top of the discipline and behavior correction of their little brats, but I beg to differ… You have no clue what you’re doing. When executing punishment one must strive to maximize the fear factor on the child’s part, while minimizing the effort exerted on one’s own part. It is vital that the child never feels that he, or she, can get away with murder on your watch. Remember the “Scared Straight” program for young juvenile delinquents? Well, we are going to dig deeper into the torture chambers of our hearts and find new and interesting ways to set the world straight from high above our ivory towers of flawless parenting. All in good fun, of course. For us…

Now, let’s look at some classic disciplinary actions and see what we can utilize instead, in terms of more creative methods.

Taking a Toy Away

Uncle Tom, please. Walking into your kid’s room and picking out a toy to be “withheld” from his or hers joyous games and plays will only last so long. All kids have ADD - they won’t have a shadow of a clue what toy you took away even 5 minutes after the fact. They are too busy having epileptic seizures in front of the Xbox.

When you “take a toy away” you have to make a statement. When your young one has committed some heinous act of disrespect, you go out to your garage, grab the nail gun, march back into the house, kick open the door to the kid’s room and proceed to nail his favorite toys to the ceiling, the walls, and the floor. Pfump – pfump – pfump… Get them nailed down real good and hard, so there’s no chance for the child to budge them even a millimeter. This way the toys will still be right there in the kid’s field of vision, but for all he/she can play with them, they might as well be on fucking Mars. The toys will be a constant reminder of what happens when the child crosses you - Monuments of Punishment, even. When tearing loose with the nail gun, you can wear a hockey mask for effect – that seems to put a spin on the fear/shock ratio somewhat.

To make the most of the punishment, and really drive your point home, you get extra credits if you pour concrete in the sandbox and burn the tree house. To make the Principal’s List during extra trying times, give the hamster away to a snake farm and put his/her favorite sibling up for adoption.

See, it’s not always what you take away, it’s how you do it.

Sending to the Room / Grounding

Yeah, OK. Have you been in your kid’s room lately? I would rather fucking hang out there than in my own damn room. Video games, Legos, DVDs, computers, CDs, candy from two Halloweens ago, electric trains and bebe guns... Give me a fucking break - it’s like Chuck E Cheese without the damn rat. Never send the kid to his/her room, unless you want to reward him/her for what they just did.

No, I think that freedom bereavement, in the name of discipline, should be a little harder than that. I would recommend the Darth B. Gone Method. It’s basically a huge motorcycle helmet, put on backwards, and secured with hooks to a collar. Inside this insulated helmet total blackness reigns supreme, leaving the child deaf and blind and wheezing like an old lady, and still provides you with the opportunity to not have to actually build a cell for the occasion. Now you are free to send the child to his/her room. After a few turns of randomly bouncing into things, the child will either get so dizzy he/she throws up inside the helmet, adding to the punishment by an act of self-infliction, or just sit down to await the ever so elusive Hour of Redemption (yeah, right – what are we, stupid?). Either or, the kid is out of your hair and, technically, sent to his/her room. If you have sensitive company over, just tap the little creep fondly on his helmet and roll your eyes at your visitors, “Kids and Star Wars – they never get tired of it!”

Long Term Grounding is a different story. When you have a teenager, for instance, the crimes and disrespects will take on astronomical proportions, so, naturally, you will have to punish accordingly. For failing Spanish in school, a trip to Habla Espanol Camp, complete with strawberry-picking illegal immigrants, in California is in order – and it will make you money! For being caught kissing a boy behind the feed store, a trip to The Fork'n'Spoon Playing Camp in the Ozarks comes in handy. See the pattern here? You ground the kid away from home! Why should you have to put up with some mopey ass kid for weeks on end? You didn’t do anything wrong! Punish where punishment is due – AWAY from you. So many parents fuck up this golden rule of thumb. You would be surprised. Grounding should never mean “at home”.

I know… It’s not always the season for all these “camps”, and you may not be able to afford such luxuries (for you), but here’s the kicker: make them up. Be creative.

When our daughter acts up we send her to “Aunt Dottie Camp”. That basically entails sending the kid to the trailer park of her 89-year old distant great-great aunt. There she gets to hear the same old excruciatingly boring stories over and over again, shine the hubcaps of the “house”, and also change the old one’s diapers on a daily basis. Needless to say there are only old people in the community, all bat shit crazy, of course, and there is no such thing as A/C anywhere. Sharing the bed with your incontinent old aunt, in 100 degrees of sweltering heat, has never hurt anybody… much. I guarantee you that ‘I will ground you’, will take on a whole new meaning after this.

We all have evil relatives we can’t stand. Kill two birds with one stone and reunite parts of the family, yourself excluded, while executing some well deserved punishment.

The Speech

Even though The Speech at times fills the function of being so unbearably boring that kids dread it more than being smacked in the ass, it still takes a lot of effort on your part. You have to stand there, delivering some drivel on how you hope there is a lesson learned in all this, how you hope the child will ponder his/her actions and see how hurtful they can be to others and blah blah blah… Too much fucking work! First offense, tell the kid there is no tooth fairy and prove it by showing them their old brown baby teeth you saved in a matchbox back when you considered such silly notions real “parenting”. Second offense, tell the kid there is no Easter bunny – he was boiled by this crazy woman who stalked Michael Douglas. Show them the scene in the movie. Third offense, tell the kid Santa is a fictitious capitalist circus swine feeding on the greed of children. Show them last year’s wrapping paper in the garage and the letter you never mailed. Tell them, that now that they know, naturally there will be no more Christmases. Fourth offense, tell them Jesus didn’t die for our sins. He just died, period. A decent man, nailed in torment and agony to a cross because people were sick of his whining. If you wear your hockey mask, and fidget nervously with your nail gun during this speech, it will make the child listen more attentively.

The Smack

OK. Some of you are just never going to get this. “You can’t hit your child!” The Ghost of CPS (that’s Child Protection Services, to those of you who are not on a nickname basis with them) is forever looming over us, like some vulture perched on our shoulder. Hey, listen… When I was a kid I would get the snot kicked out of me if I did half the shit these kids just get a damn toy taken away for. We are so fucking afraid, in these PC and socially enlightened times, to raise our hands to these little brats, even though the situation may call for it, that we would rather have them walk all over us.

For instance… If your 8 year old tells you to go fuck yourself, there is no speech, grounding or toy destruction in the world that should stop you from executing that corporal punishment.

So how do you do it, and get away with it?

I have found that pet stores have great methods to solve these dilemmas. We love our dogs, right? But still we put up electric fences and give them shock collars. Think of your child as the retarded family pet. In a way they are; stupid, loving and utterly dependant upon your nurturing care. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. You could either equip your child with a shock collar and just buzz away when you feel disrespect is in the air, or you could set up an electric fence that is 4 by 4 feet. This works wonderfully in conjunction with the freedom bereavement method discussed earlier – the Darth B. Gone helmet. Videotape the event and send it to America’s Funniest Home Videos, just to see what goofy sound effects they will set to the zaps and what lame jokes Bob Saget will crack at the expense of your kid. Another shot at making money if you make it to the Grand Prize Finale!

The Doof is also an excellent way to smack your kid in public, while still looking like a “cool” parent. You say ‘Hey! Whatsamatta with you?" in your toughest New Yawk accent, and “lovingly” smack the kid in the back of the head. Instantly you are transformed from "Parentally Bad" to "Ethnically Quaint", and instead of the store manager calling the cops on you, he will flash you a big grin and give you the secret hand shake. You might want to invest in a whiplash collar for the child to wear around the house, as these doofs can generate an addiction to smack at random in your right hand.

Most importantly: Leave no marks… on the body. Unfortunately, good parenting will leave deep marks in the minds of these impressionable little youngsters, but that is inevitable, and only serves to carry on the tradition of quality parenting when they, themselves, raise a family one day.

What would our society be like if we just let these kids run around willy-nilly? It would be like… well, like your fucking house. Perish the thought.

Kids suck. Tell me about it on my Guest Page.