Going into parenting, I had always assumed the worst child behavior would be the loudest and wildest: hitting, screaming, crying, and temper tantrums. I was wrong. The most evil conduct exhibited by children is actually something more subtle–and intelligent.
Picture this: your 4-year-old sees you cooking dinner and wants to help. You can’t say no to that. So you start by telling your child, “Okay sweetie, let’s first pour the ingredients into this bowl.”
As your little helper pours the ingredients all over the counter, you think to yourself, “Minor setback, well worth the adorable effort.”
But she wants to do more. Inside a pan you were going to use, she mixes a full stick of butter with chopped vegetables she stole from your cutting board. She then coats her creation with several incompatible spices from the spice rack.
Notice that by doing this, she sabotages your project just as badly as if she had angrily thrown the ingredients all over the floor. But the latter situation at least has a solution: you can banish your child from the kitchen without feeling guilty.
In the current scenario, however, you wouldn’t dare. After all, your child is not misbehaving, she is simply “helping” you make dinner.
See the trick? She discovered how to make you stressed and miserable without facing any negative consequences.
“This is how children learn,” you might say. But that’s the problem; they don’t learn. Even after 30 failed attempts, they still pretend to think they can pour 2 quarts of milk into a single measuring cup. They never improve, yet never relent. You are stuck in an infinite soul-sucking prank.
I call this “The Evil Genius of Children.” It’s an evolutionary phenomenon. Whenever experts discover how to manage children’s torture techniques, they just develop new ones.
I realized that with my kids. And what astonished me the most was the originality and creativity of their sinister tactics. Here are some examples:
Mary
At the age of 8 weeks, our little Mary masterminded a plan to destroy my back.
The way it began was simple. She was a colicky baby who could only rest peacefully while nursing. After experimenting with many unsuccessful methods, I tried bouncing her on an exercise ball. She crashed after a few minutes. “There we go,” I thought. “I discovered the secret!”
It was a trap. Over time, each bouncing session took just a little bit longer to help her sleep than the last one. Oblivious to these incremental changes, I kept assuming the exercise ball was the best trick in the book.
As this continued, my back felt just a little bit sorer every morning. But I still didn’t catch on; I told myself it must be from running or lifting, or perhaps I was sleeping funny.
By the time the pain became severe, I finally realized that our “five minute” exercise ball sessions were lasting 45 minutes.
Think about it: had Mary demanded 45 minutes of bouncing during our first exercise ball session, I never would have tried it again. But she knew that, which is why she started small and patiently added time to each bouncing session. In her big, blue, villainous eyes, I was the frog in the boiling water.
That is how our 8 pound infant destroyed my back. That was her evil genius.
David
Anyone familiar with our family may assume that David’s evil genius is his Tasmanian Devil persona. But his most sinister niche actually pertains to a more mundane concept: table lamps.
Thanks to Laura’s hatred of ceiling lights, we have many table lamps in our house. And they all have this twisty knob for the on/off switch:
One day, however, I reached over to turn off a lamp and noticed that someone had stolen the switch knob:
We didn’t know who it was until we caught David in the act. We warned him not to do it again. It became one of his favorite hobbies. And each time he pulled the knob off, we never saw it again. We have been turning our lights on and off by plugging and pulling the cords for months.
What kind of sick person does such a thing?
You might say, “Kyle, don’t you realize you can simply order new lamp knobs on Amazon?”
You’re missing the point: Just because I’m slow to find solutions does not mean David is less culpable. To the contrary, he’s exploiting my weakness; he’s targeting the vulnerable!
You also might say, “For God’s sake, Kyle, he’s just a kid. He likes to play with stuff, he doesn’t know any better…”
Oh yeah? Just look at how he marks his next victims…
Matthew
Every now and then when I’m getting ready for work, I notice the shower water is not warming up.
“It’s probably taking a little longer than usual,” I wishfully tell myself. “It’ll warm up any minute.” But each passing second the water remains cold gradually solidifies my catastrophic realization: the water heater is turned off. And much to my first-world detriment, turning it back on will not warm up the running water before I need to leave. Cold shower it is.
Damnit, Matthew!
Yes, I’m blaming our one-year-old. How do I know it was him? Simple. The water heater is located in the laundry room. Matthew occasionally crawls in whenever one of us is switching laundry loads. And because of his age, we assumed he could do no harm.
There’s only one problem: our water heater company “childproofed” the contraption by placing the control panel this high off the ground:
Keenly aware of the manufacturer’s incompetence–and my cake-eater sensitivity to extreme discomfort–Matthew saw an opportunity to make my mornings a living hell. Cunning devil.
On a concluding note…
Whenever I air these grievances to our parents or any other child-rearing veterans, I am told that no matter how much children torment and break me now, I will later give anything to get back these years.
But that just further proves my thesis: they not only torture you, they know to make you miss the torturing.
That is perhaps their most evil genius of all. You cannot imagine life without them. You don’t want to imagine life without them. The future misery seems so severe that I can foresee myself imagining the worst of times just to keep those memories as real as I can.
In fact, I just might reenact those memories when I’m older: breaking my hips on the exercise ball, starting a lamp knob collection, and stealing the furnace room keys to carry out my cold shower pranks.
And if that gets me into trouble with the nursing home caretakers, I will simply tell them, “What’s the matter, can’t compete with the evil genius of your elders?”
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