Telling me to cheer up may be the last words you ever speak
YOUR HUMBLE NARRATOR saw a parent performing the time-honoured ritual of losing it.
"Stop looking at me like that," she screeched, red in the face, jumping up and down. Her child was so astonished that he couldn’t take his eyes off her, and neither could the rest of us. Business at the supermarket came to a complete halt for a minute, which, given current prices, suggests a multi-billion dollar loss. My trolley alone contained close to a million dollars' worth of basics, that is, two jars of coffee and a capsicum.
If I'd had been quicker, I could have recorded the scene on my camera-phone and garnered four billion hits on YouTube, now that we're living in an age where quality entertainment is defined as shaky camera-phone videos of people having tantrums.
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The following day, I saw a woman at a bus stop hollering: "STOP CRYING," at a small child. Incredibly, being screamed at did not turn his tears to joy. I tried to think of a polite way of telling her she should be jailed for being an utterly hopeless parent. (I'm still working on it).
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Both the above are self-defeating utterances. Another is: "Go to sleep". I know parents who whisper it, coo it, croon it, shout it and shriek it, it never occurring to them that they are asking the impossible. Adults cannot fall asleep to order, so why think children can?
The easy way to get a child to sleep is give her something she CAN do. "I’m not asking you to go to sleep," I tell my daughter. "I just want you to lie there quietly and think of ponies and puppies and birthday cake." Thirty seconds later she is in a coma that a one megaton nuclear bomb in the bedroom could not disturb. (I’ve tried it.)
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But the self-defeating phrase I hate most is: "Cheer up." I’m not sure why this is, but you can approach any person suffering from low spirits, and tell them to cheer up, and they will immediately turn into a psychotic mass murderer. I’m one myself. One moment I’m feeling mildly depressed, my wife says, “Cheer up,” and the next thing I know I’m knee-deep in blood and there are corpses strewn as far as the eye can see. It happens every time.
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Meanwhile, back to that woman at the bus stop shouting at her child. I stroll past them and pause, staring at the ground. "Eww, look at that HUGE beetle," I exclaim.
"Where?" says the mother stepping backwards.
"Where?" says the child, stepping forwards.
"There," I say, pointing to a small bug on the pavement.
"That's not HUGE," objects the child, brows furrowed.
"Have you seen a bigger one, then?" I ask.
"LOADS of times," he says, with that deep solemnity reserved for small boys talking about things which are important to them.
The crying has been forgotten. Self-defeating statements not needed. The secret of child psychology is understanding kids’ priorities. For small boys, bugs are important.
So promise me: never say “stop crying”, “go to sleep” or “cheer up” to anyone, child or adult again. Or at least, not until I have the camera phone ready. YouTube and I are standing by for you to make us famous.
