It is very fortunate that the three strikes rule does not apply to parents. Because if it did, I think I would’ve lost a lifetime of baseball, without a single hit. I’m going to tell you quite frankly about my top three blunders; hopefully you can learn from my mistakes.
My first blunder was allowing my 12-year-old little girl to wear makeup. Now it probably wouldn’t have been so bad if she hadn’t been going to her very first dance, talking to her very first boy. After her mom was done with her makeup I knew I’d made a mistake. You see my daughter looks almost exactly like her mother and her mother looks like Kim Kardashian. Needless to say, even though my daughter was very conservatively dressed, her body type and, the makeup made her look like a grown woman. I spent the entire evening shadowing my daughter and her little 12-year-old boyfriend; not that I didn’t trust my little girl. She’s a good kid, and so was the guy she was going with but, I was giving all the grown men dirty looks because, believe me, the grown men were giving my daughter dirty looks. I think I could’ve avoided the entire situation had I agreed to slight makeup meaning maybe a little lip gloss maybe a little foundation something that makes a 12-year-old feel like she’s 13 and instead of 30. Totally my bad and I paid for it.
My second blunder has to do with my nine-year-old little boy. In some flight of fantasy I thought it would be okay if I bought my son a BB gun. We live in the heart of Los Angeles, and although there are not very many woodland creatures in our area, there were even fewer after I gave my son that BB gun. I began to find dead animals all over the place; the stench was aggressive. I pulled my son to the side and asked him why he wanted to kill everything…. He told me he was just looking for a challenge, visions of John Wayne Gacy danced through my head. Needless to say I took the BB gun from him, and gave his victims a proper burial. Nine-year-olds are too young for BB guns (who knew). A good alternative would’ve been the plastic pellet guns they sell at Walmart; this nonlethal alternative would have saved many a flora and fauna. Lesson learned.
My third blunder may have been actually my first blunder. Children are very smart it takes very little for them to play one parent against the other. My wife and I once made the mistake of disagreeing on the topic pertaining to the entertainment of our children. Certainly, because the children have a vested interest in the outcome of this discussion, they very skillfully, and with utter manipulation managed to poison the pool so to speak. Children see any dissension between the parents as a kink in the armor, and such kinks are worthy of skillfully and aimed arrows. It is very important for consistency sake; for the sake of your children; and for the sake of your marriage; that you not allow the children to know when you disagree. That is not to say that interaction between you and your significant other cannot take place in front of the children only that the children see a mostly united front.