In a moment that I can only attribute to channeling my mother yesterday, I told my daughter that if she didn’t clean up her toys, I was going to throw them away or give them to needy kids who appreciated them. Um, yeah. She’s only 2 1/2, and it wasn’t my finest moment, but it’s one of those idle threats that my mom used to shoot off when I didn’t tidy up after myself (although in my mother’s case, it may not have been so idle). When I later told the husband what had happened, he looked at me like I had just announced that I wanted to go bathe in raw sewage. I said “Oh, c’mon, you know that standard parental threat! Didn’t your mom ever say that to you?!” His response, “Um, no. Never.” Aside from being a perfect explanation of the differences between my type-a anal retention and his blase attitude about everything, it raised a debate. IS that a standard parental threat? In my household, it most definitely was, but now I’m wondering if my parents were the exception rather than the norm. I’ve got that Chinese mother thing going on that ups the intensity factor of childhood, so maybe that’s where it came from. Did your parents threaten you with getting rid of whatever you didn’t clean up? Did it make you more neat or less so? And what other kinds of parental threats do you remember? Ah, nostalgia.
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Tags: parenting
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HA! Um, I totally received that threat once or twice and I am pretty sure I didn’t have a Chinese mother.
The threat that struck the most fear in my heart? If I was out with my parents and I started acting out, my mom would say, “Do I have to take you to the bathroom?” Not because she was seeing if I had to pee, mind you, but because was going to give me a stern talking to. It was always enough to get me to act right.
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Nope, never. But my mom was far more the type to just clean up the mess herself so that it got done in 5 minutes rather than get into a whole thing with me about it.
I totally acknowledge that this is, at its core, lazy parenting. But truth be told, as a mom I do it all the darn time. I hate it when I act like my mother! Nooooo!
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