What I wish I had known before I had a second child

One thing I’ve never seen advertised about parenting is how difficult it is to discipline a child when what they’re doing is essentially hilarious. My daughter went through a long period of exasperatingly shouting, “OH, FUNKIN HELL!” whenever she experienced the slightest discomfort. Although I was afraid of the looks I would get in public and the awkward conversations I would have to have with her caregivers, I didn’t really try to turn her from her blasphemous path because her bouts of profanity brought so much joy to my life. brought life. that I didn’t dare to blunt them. Now that I have two children, I find myself at the crossroads between The Good and The Funny when it comes to my son’s minor bouts of sibling violence. After being pushed aside for the rest of his life, having toys ripped out of his hands and dragged across the floor against his will, he finally snapped and hit my daughter in the face with an open hand. Due to his normal Zen behavior, this was extremely uncharacteristic of him and therefore quite funny. The way he did that was also with the razor-sharp precision of the sensei Karate kid catching a fly with his chopsticks. He was generally a calm child and did not break character except by letting out a guttural scream, hitting her and then going about his baby business. Apparently he had reached his limit of capsizing for sport, and he wanted to give my daughter a taste of what was to come if she didn’t leave him alone with his Duplo blocks. When my daughter came to report the incident to me, I feigned sympathy, of course, but then immediately ran to report the incident to my husband, replaying all the players as if it were the Will Smith Oscar blow. Since the first incident, my son doesn’t seem to have developed any serious bloodlust, but he will from time to time react with cat-like reflexes when my daughter goes too far. When he does, I reprimand him for my daughter’s sake, but I do so knowing that he won’t understand many words and that I’ll probably see a few more chubby hand claps before he grows up and I really have to start intervening .