Kids Uncooperated

There are approximately 75 million children in the United States. Out of those 75 million I'm positive 74,999,996 of them can get away with anything. The De Leon family in Houston, Texas is very strict. To be fair, we won't be seeing any of the previous sentences in an ad with Sally Struthers anytime soon, but I'm confident in those statistics. I was about to substitute Sarah McLachlan for Sally Struthers, but then I realized Sarah McLachlan doesn't care about humans that much.

For $1 a day you can stop hearing "Angel." Might have heard that wrong.

I never understood why kids don't have to abide by the rules of government. There are plenty of signs in front of stores that say "no soliciting" yet up again marches Troop 452 of the Girl Scouts from Pleasantville, CA trying to sell me a thin mint for the 8th consecutive day. Is it weird that I go to the same place of business 8 straight days? Sure. But this isn't about me. This is about the laws governing this country and how children, just because they are selling a delicious treat that I may have purchased somewhere between 10 and 40 times, do not have to follow the rules set forth by larger humans. Not to mention the fact that if I threw an eraser at someone as a 31 year old adult, I would be booked for assault, but Patrick Jeffrey did it in 4th grade and he went to detention and they had lemonade.

The only solution is to commit crimes in an educational setting with a refreshing drink option.

The reason I bring this up is not because I don't like children. I do. Some of them are cute and you want to put them in your shopping cart and take them home so you can pick up women at the park. Unfortunately, the entire world has a problem with abducting children to use for romantic gain. It has really put a crimp in my rolodex. (1990s term) The way kids act, obviously, comes down to how their parents raise them. Parents are responsible for raising their kids the proper way. You can't coddle your kids and have them fly Lufthansa all the time. Sometimes they need a little talking to when the younger sibling hits the older one in the head with a souvenir baseball bat. Or you can handle it the way my parents did.

Why was your face so close to the bat?

I'm at the age where a lot of my friends talk about having kids or have little mini-humans running around their homes pooping everywhere. It amazes me why no one has created a house made solely out of diaper material. This seems to be the obvious solution to having a pet or a kid. The past month or so I've been involved in a few conversations about how people would and are raising their real or imaginary children. Most people have the same theories on raising children. Give them their vitamins, cut back on the amount of TV they watch, and keep them away from Justin Bieber's fertile sperm attack. But the one issue that keeps cropping up in all these conversations is what sports kids are allowed to play.

As parents (I'm not a parent, but in the future if I'm lucky enough to trick a women to get pregnant I will be put in this category so stop word parsing. No one likes a parser.) we want our kids to grown up to be cool, popular, good looking, and most importantly rich because when we get old, Social Security will cease to exist and we'll be living on the moon which will be difficult to hide our money in our pillowcases with the whole no gravity thing getting in the way. But biggest of all we want our kids to be safe. Playing sports is where the coolness converges with the safety. If I could draw one of those graphs on this blog to illustrate I still wouldn't do it since I'm not good at drawing. The other day the topic of sports we would let our kids play came up and both of my friends said they wouldn't let their kids play football.

I wish my mom wouldn't have let me play. Pigskin burn.

It seems to be a prevailing thought among most of my friends (men and women) that their kids won't be allowed to play football. It does make perfect sense. There have been studies that show football shortens your lifespan and gives you more permanent injuries than you would sustain playing another sport. I, usually, don't say anything around these conversations because I’m not sure where I stand on the topic and as I've said repeatedly I want to be the cool parent. If my kid wants to jump off buildings for fun then go buy some bungee cords kid! But first ask mom because I do not want to get yelled at later like the time I bought a butter substitute. I didn’t see the “not” on the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” ok?!? It would be a weird marketing tool to say “I Can’t Believe It’s Butter,” though. Point taken.

Advantage? Literacy.

My mom was terrified when I started playing football. I’m sure my parents had many arguments (see: 1) over whether I was going to be allowed to play. At the end of the day they let me play and luckily for my mom I was so good that I only played roughly 30 plays my entire high school career. Less is more? No? The point is that raising children is never as cut and dry as they can or can’t do certain things. One of my friends is set on her kid becoming a tennis star. She’s been looking for private teachers that can teach the kid the right way to play right at a young age. She doesn’t have a kid. Another one of my friends is trying to get his son to throw left handed so he has a better chance to play professional baseball. He’s 2. We have this view that we know exactly what we want for our kids, but it won’t work out that way. One day they’ll come up to us and say “I want to play football” or "I want to go sky diving," or "I stole $432 of North Face gear from the mall and now they're banning me for life, but my shift at Hot Topic is in 20 minutes," and we’ll be faced with a decision we had made long before that point. If that ever happens to me I’ll only tell my kid one thing.

Ask your mother.