I Learned Parenting from Mike Brady

There's an episode of The Brady Bunch where Greg gets grounded from driving because he was nearly involved in an accident and didn't admit it. He drives later anyway, using the defense that Mike didn't actual prohibit him because he didn't use the "exact words" that he couldn't drive. So Mike makes him stick to doing everything based on exact words to teach him a lesson, including suffering through taking Bobby with him on a date at the drive-in, because Greg said he would take him to a movie "sometime". Of course sitcom hilarity ensues, when Bobby also takes his pet frog which ends up on a greasy drive-in pizza and resulting in an overly disgusted date for Greg.

At our house, a bout with the cold has been going around; I got it and had a few sniffles and felt wiped out enough that I missed a day of work. I in turn gave it to my son, who got croup for a couple of days and missed school. Then my wife, who braved out a week before taking a couple of days sick. The day before my wife's first sick day my daughter threw up at a kids' birthday party, and couldn't keep anything down the night before. The next day, she wolfed down a piece of toast with chocolate sprinkles and then complained that her tummy hurt after we admitted she might have to stay home from school if she felt sick enough. My wife being very sick couldn't really take care of her, and I wasn't completely convinced she was all that sick, but I let her stay home anyway figuring it couldn't hurt.

Here's where I used the wisdom of Mike Brady. Yes, I am aware that it's a TV show, and Mike Brady represents the wisdom of the show's writers, but hear me out. I told my daughter that her Mom was too sick to take care of her, that she wouldn't be able to play with her and that she had to help her Mom out because she was pretty sick. The Mike Brady philosophy of creating a situation with consequences and forcing the child to learn a valuable lesson from it worked. When I returned home from work the first sentence out of my daughter's mouth was, "Daddy, I want to go back to school tomorrow."

In a way, I find the Mike Brady philosophy of parenting reprehensible. So your kid won't admit to nearly causing an accident. Why won't he do it? Because he knows that you'll create a situation of compounding negativity from which he'll never escape unless he cops to learning a lesson. On TV we move onto the next episode and another valuable lesson, and the negativity is never mentioned again because each TV episode is a complete vacuum so that viewers can consume it without knowing much about the show. But in reality, you can string together the opportunity of negative situations and you hope that your child will get something out of it. At the very least, learning how to avoid them. Perhaps through secrecy and cons, but understanding the consequences anyway.