Your child wants an Angry Birds plush figurine, and you’ve been using it as bait – for a cleaned room, for finished chores, for eating piles of peas – over the course of several days.
You’ve seen the furry little things at Wal-Mart, so it’s no problem.
But then – the clothes picked up, the play room clear and the veggies begrudgingly swallowed – you take her to the store only to find those frustrated, brow-furrowed birds are not in the kids’ section. They are, in fact, dog toys.
What do you do?
Do you think of a teenage girl, 10 years down the road, spilling the story and explaining to some counselor her father’s thoughtlessness is the reason she can’t get above a C in biology? Of a young woman unable to commit to a relationship because her father was unwilling to search to fill her needs?
Of a bitter divorcee, who one day decades from now has a break-through with her therapist, when she’s finally able to verbalize her father treated her like an animal?
These are almost certainly the responsible thoughts of a forward-looking adult.
Or do you push and pry your child on past the smirking clerk, unable to get her out of the store before she uses every inch of the checkout aisle — shows every customer how – to bang and squeak and then cackle at a spanking new dog toy?
Oink.
