Your Child Is Not A Faberge Egg: How To Raise A Tough Baby

Earlier today I took my five year-old grandson to the local playground and was looking forward to showing him how to climb on the monkeybars.  I was aghast when I discovered that the monkeybars had been taken down years before, all because some kid fell and cracked open his noggin like a ripened coconut.  Maybe children these days have softer heads, I don't know.

When I was a boy I had climbed all over the monkeybars and fell numerous times, and I turned out just fine.  These days, parents coddle their kids so much that if they get a scraped knee they get taken to the emergency room for a full battery of tests.  If this continues, in a few years our nation will become one inhabited by a bunch of sissies.

You see, kids need to grow up believing that they are strong enough to handle all of life's hardships.  Kids need to be made aware that mama's not always going to be around to kiss their boo boos.

Fortunately, my parents were keenly aware of this and they did their best to raise a boy who would grow up to be one tough son-of-a-gun (as you can see by my baby picture above).  As a boy I never had a fancy bed.  Instead, my daddy made me sleep on the floor out in the toolshed.  He would wake me up at the crack of dawn every morning by dousing me with a bucket of water and mother would serve me a cup of black coffee, cold.  "Hot coffee is for wimps," she would tell me.  "Now shut your yappin' and drink up.  It'll put hair on your chest."  And by gum, she was right.  She would then hand me a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes and send me off to school.

And when it came time to play, we did so without the need for helmets and knee pads.  The only time I ever wore a helmet as a boy was when I was playing football, and those helmets were made out of leather.  I had eleven concussions by the time I graduated high school but I turned out alright.  Sure, I sometimes forget the names of family members and every once in a while I have to be reminded by my wife that my underpants go on beneath my trousers, but in my opinion a little brain damage is a small price to pay for behaving like a real man.

My message to parents is this:  Stop treating your children as if they were made out of glass.  A child's body is a lot more durable and resilient than you think.  There's a reason why babies have soft skulls; it protects their tiny little brains when you drop them.  Most of the time, they'll bounce right back up.