PrintJuly 25, 2010
Who's Watching Big Brother?
My summer job at thirteen was babysitting a set of eight-year old twins, adorable little monsters under my bungling care, all day long, nine hours a day, five days a week. (Fortunately the experience wasn't so scarring as to prevent me from marrying and raising a family of my own some years later.)One day after catching one of the twins in a huge lie (the proverbial straw), fearful of losing what little control I maintained to protect the home from total destruction and after exhausting all of the positive-reinforcement techniques my teenage brain could imagine, I decided to go for a little negative discipline. To my dismay, I found I couldn't convince her that not only should she not lie, but that her lie was a bad thing. Her young mind had already begun to rationalize the meaning of "is" and adopted the "lies are only wrong if caught, and even then only if they hurt someone" philosophy. Finally at my wit's end, in response to her "Who cares...(Read Full Article)
