The Joys? of Parenting

The crack about the Nixon parenting method was made just before Deep Throat came forward. Talk about a weird coincidence.

Except that the parenting seems not to be working. D.D. punched a boy in the nose at after-school care and made it bleed. There was much eye-closing and sighing around here after she finally confessed. The boy had been pulling her dress up and wouldn't stop, and she claimed she couldn't get the teacher's attention, and finally, her "mind was out of control", and she punched him. Her friends claim he deserves it, because he's punched them, too, but we don't want our daughter to use violence to counter violence. Of course, now that he knows she might *make him bleed*, he might not try anything with her again.

She gave herself a week's restriction from tv before we could even come up with a punishment, so we went with that. Then she wrote a heartfelt letter to Barbie on her web site and said that the one thing she would like to change about herself is her fury. We knew she was on the Barbie site, but our interest was piqued when she asked how to spell "school" and "fury", so I went and had a look at what she was writing. We're thinking that the pre-programmed Barbie response will probably not be appropriate to the Daughter's soul-baring letter.