Dave Barry - Bad Habits

I have been a father for nearly six months now, so needless to say I know virtually everything there is to know about raising babies. The main thing is discipline. You have to ignore all those bleeding-heart psychological theories about being sensitive to your baby’s many delicate emotional wants. These theories are based on the insane premise that babies have many delicate emotional wants. In fact, babies have only one want, and it is hardly delicate: They want to put everything in the entire world except food into their mouths. As far as babies are concerned, the sole function of the world is to provide objects for them to drool on. If you were to open up a baby—and I am not for a minute suggesting that you should—you would find that 85 to 90 percent of the space reserved for bodily organs is taken up by huge, highly active drool glands. Scientists at a major scientific university recently conducted a study in which they collected, in scientific jars, all the drool that a six-month-old baby produced in one twenty-four-hour period. They were stunned at the result. Many of them had to go home and lie down.

The greatest threat to your baby is educational toys, which you are required by federal law to buy several dozen of. Educational toys are advertised in baby magazines, which arrive by the thousands in the mail when you have a baby. In a typical ad, a baby is looking thoughtfully (for a baby) at two pieces of plastic. According to the ad, the pieces of plastic are helping the baby “acquire skills of problem-solving.” In fact, the only problem the baby is solving is the problem of how to get both pieces in its mouth. These so-called educational toys are merely encouraging your baby to act stupid.

This is dangerous. If you let your baby continue to stick things in his or her mouth, he or she will have a hard time in later life. I mean, suppose your child goes to a major Wall Street law firm for a job interview, and ends up putting all the waiting-room magazines and ashtrays in his or her mouth. He or she would make a poor impression, and would end up having to be a bum or work for the government.

So obviously, your job as a parent is to straighten your baby out. You’ll have to be tough. Here’s how I handle my five-and-a-half-month old son: When he’s lying on a blanket, putting various federally required educational toys in his mouth, I say firmly: “Robert, if you keep putting those educational toys in your mouth, I am not going to give you an allowance this week.” If he doesn’t respond to that, I up the ante. I say: “Robert, besides not giving you any allowance, I am not going to read to you from the famous Greek epic poem the Iliad, usually ascribed to Homer.” So far, Robert has continued to put educational toys in his mouth, but I think he’s getting worried.

Of course, once you get your baby away from “educational” toys, you’ll have to occupy it with new, more meaningful activities. The best activities are games. Here are some excellent, meaningful baby games designed by a distinguished panel of baby experts:

Grasp your baby firmly and put it on your head like a hat, stomach down. Then stride around the room and cluck like a chicken to the tune of “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” bouncing in time to the music.

Lie on your back and hold your baby over you, facing down; move it slowly up and down, like a flying saucer, making flying-saucer noises and feigning great fear when it appears to be about to land on the planet Earth. (NOTE. Wear protective clothing for the preceding two games.)

Lay the baby on the floor, face up. Announce that you are very hungry, and start nibbling at the baby’s toes, then its hands, and finally, with great gusto, its stomach. Every now and then, yell: “Great baby! Delicious!”

These games will teach your baby many meaningful lessons, the main one being that the world is full of deranged people.

The only other major problem you’ll have with your baby is feeding it solid foods. Many kinds of baby food are available, all of them disgusting. Basically, the baby-food industry takes things that no normal human being would ever dream of eating, such as squash, and grinds them into mush and puts them in little jars. Babies, of course, hate baby food; they would much prefer the kinds of things you eat, such as cheeseburgers and beer. If we fed babies normal food, they would be full-grown, productive adults in a matter of weeks. But this would destroy the baby-food industry.

As I noted earlier, babies do not take solid food through their mouths, which are generally occupied with other objects. Babies absorb solid food through their chins. You can save yourself a lot of frustrating effort if you smear the food directly on your baby’s chin, rather than putting it in the baby’s mouth and forcing the baby to expel it on to its chin, as so many uninformed parents do.

WARNING: This article contains the word “breast.” I checked with an editor, and he said I could say “breast” as long as I used it scientifically, rather than to arouse prurient interest. For example, I could say: “Two breasts plus two breasts equals four breasts”, but I could not say: “Hey, get a load of that breast.” Anyway, I just thought Id warn you in case you don’t want to read the word “breast.” The rest of the article is about raising babies, and it’s very informative, so for the benefit of those of you who want to read everything but the paragraph with “breast” in it, I’ll let you know when you’re about to come to it.

The most important thing to remember about raising your baby is that you must not take anyone’s advice, except, of course, mine. Many people, such as your parents, will try to advise you, but you must ignore them. If they knew so much about raising kids, they wouldn’t have screwed you up so badly.

Most people make babies out to be very complicated, but the truth is they have only three moods:

Mood One: Just about to cry. Mood Two: Crying. Mood Three: Just finished crying..lm-# Your job, as a parent, is to keep the baby in Mood Three as much as possible; this means you have to figure out why it’s crying. Here’S a tip: Babies never cry because their diapers are dirty. You change their diapers only to make yourself feel better. You could leave the same diaper on your baby for months and it would be perfectly happy, although considerably heavier and less pleasant to be around. So that leaves only two reasons your baby cries: It is hungry. Some other reason. If your baby is hungry, you should feed it.

WARNING: The next paragraph is the one with a breast in it. So you should either skip it or be prepared for some very explicit talk.

You can either bottle-feed or breast-feed your baby. Many noted health fanatics strongly recommend that you breast-feed your baby on the grounds that it is very good for the baby. This may be true, but the real advantage of breast-feeding is that only female persons can do it. This means you male persons do not have to get up at the insane hours babies like to get up at. At first you may feel guilty about this, and you’ll get up in the middle of the night to give the female person moral support. But after a while you’ll get so good at morally supporting her that you’ll be able to do it without even waking up. In the morning, when the female person is exhausted from lack of sleep, you can commiserate with her. You can say: “I know how you feel. This morally supporting is no bed of roses, either.” She’ll really appreciate hearing this.