NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS

I found these New Year’s Resolutions that I wrote down when my kids were ages nine and eleven:

These truths are held to be self-evident – evident to anyone who has attempted to raise a kid. No family has ever been or ever will be a democracy. THE PARENT HAS THE LAST WORD

With that off my chest, let me make a few New Year’s resolutions. I resolve that, under my roof:

• No one will sass his or her mother
• Everyone will eat his or her veggies
• Mom will get the computer upon demand
• People who make obnoxious noises at the dinner table will be cast into a dungeon, not to emerge until said dungeon is cleaned up. (That last part’s just a perk for Mom.)
• Changes in any routine must be cleared in advance with the monarch of this kingdom (i.e., Mom)
• Freedom of name-calling is hereby removed from the Freedom of Speech U.S. Constitutional amendment.
• Name-calling will be punishable by anything handy.

These are laws that must be accepted for survival, kind of like the law of gravity. My point is this: A FAMILY IS NOT A DEMOCRACY! Someone has to have the last word. If it’s the child, odds are that the child will grow up unstable, and the parent’s odds of going insane become dangerously greater. If it’s the parent, then the child has better odds of growing up. Period.