No one under five feet tall is running my house

August 20, 9:42 PMAnchorage Family ExaminerKellie Davis

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“No one under five feet tall is running my house,” my father told his best friend, Bob.  
 

I had tried to take Caleb out of the room, but he’d punched me in the stomach because he wanted to be near his mom. When company came over, it was my job to take the little children out and play, but that wasn’t happening that night.
 

Bob was a late father, having his first baby with a young wife when he was 50. He and his wife, his wife was 22 and not much older than me, had a four year old together. She was clueless when it came to children and she had a degree in early childhood education. They had a nanny, they had had several. They had the life I’d always dreamed of, for my entire up to then 16 years, but they couldn’t control their child.
 

“I believe in redirecting!” his smart but clueless wife said. What was redirecting? It meant not telling the child no and giving them other options. She explained this as she ran around my mother’s house, putting glass and metal urns out of the way and covering electrical outlets with her own covers that she carried by the gross in her bag. She had a lot, but she said that she didn’t know why she left them with people when they never went back to their homes.
 

My dad told her to sit down, no one was rearranging his house because Miss Space Cadet with a degree in early childhood education (and starting on a master’s degree in psychology!) with a nanny didn’t know how to control her kid! While she fumed, my dad’s friend smiled and let my dad take over.  
The child did not like my father. My dad was not the nicest of fathers, but my brother and I were pretty well behaved and it probably had a lot to do with the fact that my dad did not put up with much from anyone under five feet tall, or anyone he didn’t think should have a say in matters, and this included his friends’ four year old.
 

Four year olds, my dad told them as he put urns back in their places on the floor and pulled covers out of outlets, can reason. There was one of him, there were toys, yet he was attracted to the stairwell. As they had been conversing, Space Cadet had had to shriek and chase after him several times.
 

 “Caleb,” my dad said when Space Cadet went to check on her make-up, “if you go toward the stairwell again, your father will spank you.”
 

Caleb raced to the stairs and his dad grabbed him and spanked him twice. He did not spank him hard, but he scared him.
 

Space Cadet ran out of the bathroom, with her panty hose still around her ankles, “But we don’t believe in spanking!”
 

My father had a one on one talk with her then about how things were, that at the office, people joked about what a terror Caleb was when people visited their house, that there was a reason they never got invited anyplace. Had she noticed that people wrote, “No children” on wedding invitations, but that there were always children Caleb’s age and younger and older? She was mortified. She’d seen it but it hadn’t registered. She agreed to do things my dad’s way for the evening and see what happened.
 

My dad explained what Slovie Jungreis-Wolff maintains, that “Discipline means giving children boundaries to live by.” The evening started out with little Caleb hating my dad, but within a half hour once his mom was on board, he was trying to get my father’s attention by being good. Why? As soon as

I sat down with him to show him how some Lincoln Logs worked, my dad praised him. “What a neat tower you are building!”
 

He explained to them that they both needed to be in on the same page of the discipline so Caleb couldn’t divide and conquer. It worked.
 

What happens if you don’t establish this early? The kids get older with worse habits. (Are celebrity children often the result of this type of parenting?) Kidshealth says that if the child has a recurring action that is not getting fixed, that they may need a chart with a reward at the end. Sure, they shouldn’t need a token as a reward, doing well should be it’s own reward, but with kids and many adults now, they can’t motivate themselves without the token. Bob Nicoll practices avoiding [k]not[ty] words. Don’t tell your kids what not to do, tell them what to do.

For an evening, Caleb was tolerable and life was sweet, but the couple didn’t follow through and the little terror never got much better.