Idiotic Parental Phrasing or "I MEAN it this time!"

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Last Friday I took The Wife and The Peanut to Dutch Wonderland for the day. For those unfamiliar, Dutch Wonderland is a great amusement park for kids and families. If you live anywhere near Lancaster, PA, I highly recommend a trip. It was a perfect day. The temperature was 80 degrees with nary a cloud to be found in the sky. The park was not overcrowded. It was one of those perfect days that seem to be experienced only in books, the kind you wish you could bottle and save to experience again and again.

About three quarters of the way into our day The Peanut decided she wanted to go on a log ride that is located at the front of the park. Naturally, she chose to have this epiphany as we were wandering around at the back. The Wife's parents and her grandmother were with us for the day and her grandmother was getting a bit walked out so I engaged my caring, yet highly intelligent Husband Brain and suggested that we take the Sky Ride across the park. This suggestion was met with much rejoicing and we hitched a ride fifty feet or so above the park.

The Sky Ride at Dutch Wonderland is a typical ride that can be found in amusement parks across the country. A white plastic seat to sit with your legs dangling above the earth while a simple bar across your lap is all that is keeping you from plummeting to a messy end on top of the heads of your fellow park-goers below. With only a small canopy above your head, it is a pretty open ride. So, after ensuring that my left arm was clasped tightly around The Peanut's shoulders to prevent her from slipping (she probably wouldn't even fit under the bar but in my father's all-things-not-directly-controlled-by-me-are-accidents-waiting-to-happen vision I was taking no chances) I looked around and enjoyed the slow, gentle ride.

The Sky Ride is set up on a continual loop so that while you are going to one end of the park, other people are passing by on their way to the other. You don't pass close enough to touch, but it is pretty close. About halfway through the ride a young mother and her two boys approached. Mom sat in the middle of the two boys who looked to be about 5 and 8. The two brothers were clearly having an intense argument and the mother was literally caught in the middle. Her patience level was as depleted as the buffet at an over eaters convention. As their Sky Cart pulled even with ours I heard her hiss at the two boys "Knock it off right now. I'M SERIOUS!"

"I'm serious."

One of my all time favorite completely ineffective parenting expressions. Why do parents use this phrase or its distant cousin, "I'm NOT KIDDING!"? Think about it for a minute. When you yell at your child (more on the total ineffectiveness of yelling in a future post) that you are "serious" or "not kidding" do you realize what you are telling them? You are telling them that all the talking you did before you threw out that wonderful phrase is null and void. Unimportant. It's OK son...you don't have to obey me unless I tell you "I'm serious" or "I'm not kidding" or, my all time favorite "I MEAN IT THIS TIME!" What? The other three times you stood there with the veins in your forehead popping out, spittle flying out of your mouth with more velocity than Bill Cowher, you were KIDDING about those?

Why do parents cut their own legs out from under themselves like that? It is the equivalent of parental suicide. It is taking a gun to your credibility and blowing a hole right through it. Parents who use these ridiculous phrases are empowering their children to grow into immature whiners who feel entitled to be given consequence-free-chance after consequence-free-chance after consequence-free-chance by the world when they mess up. I'm sorry I was speeding and almost killed all the passengers in my car, officer. Don't write me a ticket, let me have another chance. Please?

Uh-uh. It doesn't work that way in the real world. So why do some parents raise their children like it does?

What kind of children would we be raising if all parents meant what they said the FIRST time they said it?