Kid Gloves

I’m gonna tell Santa Claus to come down that chimney and snatch you baldheaded!

—actress Tess Harper, yelling at her movie children in the 1986 film Crimes of the Heart

Another sign of the apocalypse: In Germany, the very epicenter of discipline, parents have taken to hiring fake Santa Clauses to make their children behave. “Parents are increasingly demanding that we bring the stick and scold their kids, rather than deliver the goodies,” Joerg Rupert Schoepfel told Reuters. Schoepfel runs a Berlin rent-a-Santa business, which dispatches Santas to thousands of homes every year.

Schoepfel said parents are demanding that he and his Santa squad direct children to work harder in school, stop fighting with their siblings, clean up their rooms, and quit sucking their pacifiers. “I’m tired of having to take their pacifiers with me,” he said. “I’ve got at least 50 already.”

Here’s what I want to know: When did parents go gutless? I know it must’ve happened after I grew up, because when I was a kid, parents didn’t need any rent-a-Santa to enforce the house rules. If a child with a mouthful of teeth was still sucking on a pacifier, mama or daddy would just get fed up one day, pull the pacifier out of the kid’s mouth, and throw it out the car window. If the kid went to the thumb backup, well, that’s when the thumb got a red-pepper poultice. In those days—just one generation ago—the parents won all the fights.

Lately, though, a whole lot of parents have gone limp. A while back, I actually heard a child at my daughter’s school announce that his parents had given him a PlayStation, as a reward, because he didn’t fight with his sister for a whole week.

I think that’s a bad strategy, one that’ll have the kid demanding a Lear jet for brushing his teeth by the time he’s 16. Personally, I’d give the kid the PlayStation out of the goodness of my heart. Then, if he laid a hand on his sister, I’d throw the PlayStation in the fireplace and make the boy pay for it out of his allowance.

But y’know, if I’d been doing my job right from the get-go, it wouldn’t ever come to that. I figure it’s up to me to light the path before a kid’s old enough to open his eyes.

At least that’s the way things worked at my house. As far back as I can remember, I had one internal rule for my behavior, which was, “If I do this, will I disappoint the old man?” I thought that way because my father, Jabo Jowers, a man full of flaws up to his eyeballs, got it across to me that our little world would be a better place if I didn’t go around pissing him off all the time.

Jabo didn’t do it with threats or drama. He just burned two thoughts in my head—not with words, but probably with deeds, mixed in with the telepathy that comes from everyday contact. I knew these two things: 1. Jabo loved me, and he’d take it mighty hard if I did anything seriously wrong; and 2. If I got way outside the lines, Jabo might just kick my ass or die trying.

Apparently, some modern-day fathers aren’t getting those messages across. Take, for instance, the Dover Township, N.J., man who got into an argument with his 10-year-old son last March. The issue was a missing container of chocolate cake icing. The father, named only as “Andrew” in the 2000 Darwin Awards (which celebrate the theory of evolution by commemorating those who improved our gene pool by removing themselves from it in really stupid ways), accused his son of taking the icing container. The boy denied it. The argument got heated, so Andrew took the boy out to the garage to settle things.

Somewhere during their screaming match, Andrew handed the boy a 5-inch kitchen knife and told the kid to stab him if he hated him so much. To his credit, the boy put the knife down. But Andrew put the knife back in the boy’s hand, then renewed the dare.

Well, don’t you know, the kid stabbed Andrew. Killed him dead as Elvis. Andrew’s last words were, “Would you believe the kid did that?”

Well, since you asked: Yes, bubba. I believe it. And I chalk it up to yet another case of sorry-ass daddying. If, after 10 years, that boy had no more respect for you than to put a hole in your chest over a cup of icing, that’s your own doing. Plus, if you’d had a lick of sense, you’d have left the knife out of the fight. You and your boy, like those people who cut off their own toes with a lawn mower, were clearly headed for a lifetime of grief anyway.