In my experience, most families with siblings raise children who claim that one or the other had a distinct advantage in the discipline department. My two youngest children who are five and six years younger than their older brother vowed that he had a distinct advantage because he found a way to make me laugh when he got in trouble. It is possible that they have a point.
Our daughter, when she and her husband were qualifying to be adoptive parents in Texas, was asked what kind of discipline her parents had used when she was growing up. She said, “I remember writing a lot of essays.” On that point, she was correct and shared a common punishment with her older brother. It’s the luck of the draw when your mother is a teacher.
I did not keep all these essays, but I ran across one from that older brother recently that I could not throw away at the time it was written – or even now – since it still makes me laugh. We lived in Germany, and he would have been in tenth grade. The stipulation was for 200 words.
Why We Should Not Play Ball in Mom’s Room
The reasons we should not play ball in mom’s room are many and diversified. Not only is it dangerous but noisy as well. (23)
Dangerous is a very ambiguous (?) word, so let me ponder a moment to discuss this in full detail. Playing ball is mom’s room is, yes, very dangerous. (50) In fact, it’s quite lethal. One, while playing ball, may find himself falling over desks, chairs, rolls of tape and/or even little clouds of dirt, (76) which could result in the connection of one’s head to the floor below, further resulting in possible irreversible brain damage. Falling over the aforementioned (100) objects brings into the picture the subject of noise. Have you ever, just for the fun of it, pushed a chair off the top of a desk? If you (129) have, then you know the tremendous impact this can have on the noise pollution scale, not to mention the headaches it can bring about. (152)
Another point is about the walls. Germans may make their walls quite sound, but this does not, in (170) any way, condone the bouncing of balls on them. Bouncing balls on walls (say, that rhymes) can leave ugly, nasty-looking marks (194) that may cause negative reactions from (200th word) children and thus stunt their learning process.
You may be wondering whether the discipline worked. For the immediate problem, balls were taken outside for bouncing after this. In the long haul, the tenth grader, who is now a grandfather, has made a practice of facing whatever life has thrown at him with a sense of humor. Just maybe, his practicing on me made him proficient at it.
