Saturday, 13 August 2011

Bribery and Corruption


Well, I did it. I committed one of the seven deadly sins of parenting. Felix is going through a testing phase at the moment of happily walking for five minutes before standing stock-still, throwing up his arms and demanding, ‘Up!’. Now, my primary method of dealing with this is to give him a choice: ‘Felix want pushchair? Felix want to walk?’ and I repeat this slowly, face-to-face until he says ‘Yes’ to one of the choices. This usually works. This morning, it didn’t. He just kept refusing to budge and wouldn’t engage with me, so I eventually picked him up to put him in the pushchair but he clung on to me like a limpet. With my back and my patience about to give out entirely, I had a brainwave: ‘If you’re good and walk, we can go to the toy shop and you can choose a car’. Oh bugger. Not disastrous in economic terms, as I had actually planned on doing just this, but a strategic EPIC FAIL. This desperate action cannot be allowed to set a precedent. However, I do find it hard to feel too dispirited as I watch him playing a very happily involved game of, ‘Where’s nee naa car?’ with his new purchase. Go on, feel free to judge...and while you’re doing that, I’ll be over here pulling my ‘care face’.

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