Things We Should Do Better

Our children are the feather in our cap, the jewel in our crown—but how can they reflect well on us when they are running as wild as a young woolly mammoth, newly thawed after a thousand years of forced idleness in the Siberian tundra?

We do our best. We play them Mozart in the womb, take them to infant sign language classes, send them to Montessori preschool, enroll them in academically-challenging elementary schools, hire SAT tutors when they are thirteen, drive them all over the city for after-school lessons, send them to summer camps for soccer/ violin/ ballet/ cheerleading/ musical theater, medicate them for ADHD, hire somebody else to write their college essays, give them therapy for teenage angst and pay a fortune for college. They should be PERFECT, right?

Then how come they’re not? How come they’re having learning difficulties/ making a mess in their rooms/ getting bad grades/ talking back/ playing too many computer games/ watching too much TV/ taking drugs/ using profanity/ getting pregnant/ making a mess in the bathroom/ being mentally ill/ being in a bad mood/ making marks on the walls/ eating too much sugar/ getting fat/ getting anorexic/ feeling aimless/ wasting time/ sleeping late/ etc.?

We’re doing so much for our kids, and they’re still not perfect? Something is not right here. We must be doing something wrong, or perhaps they are just spiteful and hugely ungrateful.

Either way, I have an idea.

No, I’m not going to suggest some kind of Soviet regime where we beat them and put them in dormitories and make them do gymnastics and hard labor.

I won’t suggest a hippie solution either, where we tell them it’s OK to be free and take off their corsets and climb trees all day instead of doing homework.

My idea is simple. They do everything the same, but they have to do it upside down.

They go to school, but they go upside down. If they can’t walk on their hands, we walk them into school holding their legs above their heads like little kids who haven’t learned to walk yet. If they are embarrassed about being walked into school, they can worry about that all day instead of whatever trouble they were plotting. At school they must stand on their heads all day or hang their heads under their desks and write notes with their notebook on the floor. During P.E. they must run around on their hands, and if they can’t do that yet, they crawl with their heads upside down. If they get kicked in the face, too bad. If they can’t catch the ball with their feet, too bad. It will give them something else to think about.

Of course, we must encourage the school to adopt an upside-down policy, or it is possible they may ask our children to leave.

After school they come home and do their homework. They do this upside down with a pencil because pens don’t write upside down. Or maybe they do it on the computer, and it takes twice as long because they have to learn to read and type upside down.

Then maybe they go over to their friend’s house. Here they are too tired to get into trouble because they have spent the whole day upside down. Even watching TV upside down is not that much fun. They fall asleep upside down. To rig up an upside-down bed at little expense, we buy a fisherman’s net, drape it from a curtain rod and hang them by their heels to sleep.

Because of the constraints of gravity on the digestive system, eating and using the toilet must be done right side up, so these are times when our children are likely to start causing trouble again. We hope they will be too exhausted from the rest of the day to remember what trouble is.

It is not advisable to put our children upside down in the bath. When our children apply for their driver’s licenses, we must not allow them to drive with their feet. (They will try.)

Our children will be grateful to us for using up their extra energy on something as harmless as living upside down. Most children secretly want to live upside down anyway. There are whole children’s books devoted to the idea. They will worship us for helping their dreams come true. Secretly, they know that their lives are too easy, and they want somebody to mix things up and make life fun again, the way it used to be when they were learning to walk and talk.

After a year or so, our children will adapt too well to the upside-down regime. They are adaptable little beggars. Their arms will grow strong; their balance will stabilize. They’ll be running around on their hands and standing for hours on their heads in front of the TV. At that point, they’ll return to their old wayward ways. We shall find that they begin to get into as much trouble as ever.

At that point, all we have to do is flip them around again. Their legs will have withered, their eyes will be used to processing things backwards and their brains will have grown accustomed to having a full load of blood rushing down on them all the time.

We simply set them right side up and watch them flounder.

Tags: children, upside down, woolly mammoth