Parenting Effectively Requires Creativity and a Sense of Humor

The Wee Little Miss is twelve years old. Twelve! My gosh. Do you realize I’ve been blogging on various platforms since she was three?! That pretty much means that some of you have basically witnessed the raising of the Wee Little Miss.

In light of that fact, I have yet another snippet of the parenting that goes on in our household to share with you.

Being twelve, occasionally the Wee Little Miss will get a tiny bit
sassy on occasion. Certainly not ever too awfully bad — but it does creep up a bit, and I’ve recently discovered an excellent way to make it stop.

It all started several days ago… it didn’t seem to matter what was going on, there was a distinct attitude coming from Wee Little Miss. I called her out on it a few times, and as a result I got a half-hearted apology and a few minutes of her normal angelic way of being… but it kept slipping back in… first small, then bigger and bigger.

I don’t know what made me think of this brilliant solution. Maybe I am a genius. Maybe I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Maybe I was just tired. Whatever it was that caused the epiphany of parenting brilliance, though, I am thankful for, because it seems to have worked.

You see, Wee Little Miss is kind of a serious person. She has an extremely dry sense of humor, and very rarely sees humor in anything stupid.

What better way to get the attention of a pre-teen with an attitude than to expose her to stupid things?

After having my idea, I could hardly wait for the chance to try it out. (Does that make me a terrible person? Possibly. Do I care? Only a little.)

As soon as an attitude crept up in Wee Little Miss’ behavior, I pounced on the opportunity like a crazed… uh, a crazed motherly animal that pounces on things.

I showed her that strange old children’s program, “Teletubbies“.

She was properly horrified. She complained and tried to figure out WHY on Earth I was insisting she see this insanity.

The Look.

After the episode was complete, I then told her that if I caught any further disrespectful lip from her, I would make her watch ten minutes of Teletubbies per infraction.

Now, if she starts catching an attitude, all I have to do is look at her and say, “Time for Teletubbies…”, and the problem suddenly vanished.