Parenting Strategies that Eventually Come Back to Haunt You

One of our neighbor's kids fell off of the couch about 18 months ago and broke her arm. She is about 6 months older than Elisabeth. We capitalized on this and used it as a way to keep Elisabeth from being crazy on the sofa. It worked, for the most part, and even today she'll explain to you exactly why she's not allowed to act crazy on the sofa.

Just like Pavlov's dog, this positive reinforcement led us to use this technique again. Elisabeth has a bad habit of standing up in the bay window and banging into it with her entire body. It just looks dangerous, I have no idea if the window would actually break or not. But we told her that one time, Sarah (the little girl who broke her arm's sister) was doing something exactly like that in her bay window and the window broke and she fell in the bush! For added effect, we told her that in the bush was a big, huge snake.

We haven't employed this technique in other situations because, well, the snake story didn't resonate with her. She still bangs into the window, driving me nuts.

But, yesterday, Anna (the little girl who started this whole thing by breaking her arm) was over here playing with Elisabeth. I guess we've hit the point where we can't expect the things we say to remain private because she asked Anna about the story in great detail. Anna, of course, knew nothing. I would love to know whether Anna related the story to her parents over dinner...