At the risk of sounding like a pretentious smartass, I’ll say that parenthood has been an exercise in understanding the human condition. Because you know babies are as unadulterated as they come – just a little bundle of human instincts. They don’t give a rat’s ass what you think and they want what they want right now.

They’re motivated by one thing alone, and that is incentives.

At first, I wanted to teach the kids about *wanting* to be good just because it’s the right thing to do. To look past instant gratification and not be motivated by these trifle pleasures. I wanted to teach them stuff like selflessness and charity. I thought I could persuade them with the brilliant logic of my argument so that they would do my bidding without question. Ha, who am I kidding? I never quite bought all that myself anyway. At least not until I turned 26 and became a mom, and even then, I’m hardly the poster girl for altruism.

Take for example the time I had to teach Tru about sharing. I asked him to share and he said no. So I tried explaining the benefits of sharing – so that we could all be happy. From his look of disdain, I could tell that he obviously didn’t agree. He was all like “this is ridiculous mom, I’m not at all happy to share so don’t try to tell me that sharing makes us all happy”. Then I told him that sharing is being nice to others and it’s important to be nice because we get a sense of satisfaction when we give stuff to others. And he was like “yeah, good try mom, now watch me shriek like a banshee when you so much as look at my snack.” Eventually, I had to settle with offering him more snacks if he shared (incentive) and threatening to take away his snack if he didn’t share (also an incentive if you think about it).

It was the same with eating his food. When it was stuff he hated, (vegetables are the exception because I think he would rather lose a kidney than eat spinach) I had to resort to the two-pronged strategy of dangling gummies and threatening the naughty corner. He would take a minute to consider his options and finally open his mouth while making faces of the vomit variety.

I used to think that parents who had to resort to bribery and threats were doing it all wrong. Didn’t they know they were raising brats who would only do something for someone else if there was something in it for them? Besides, isn’t it like training a seal? “Good boy, here’s a fish for you. Now jump through this ring of fire.”

But you see, at least that’s a start – that they’re even doing it at all. I’m hoping that if I offer a gummy to inculcate good behavior, at some point, they’ll do it even when we’re all out of gummies. Hopefully they’re so used to doing the right thing even when they didn’t understand or agree, so it wouldn’t seem like such a big deal to share their last cookie or give up a seat or tell the truth.

Although there’s a pretty good chance that they will turn out to be obese or toothless before that happens so I’m on the hunt for sugar-free gummies which I will cut into very tiny pieces so each gummy is effectively 1/10 of a whole gummy and even if they eat 10 gummies a day, it’ll be like eating just 1 gummy. I can’t wait for the day he’ll bargain for more gummies and I’ll have to do up a chart like 3 gummies for sharing and 5 gummies for eating 1 spinach.

Bollocks, that whole paragraph looks like some ridiculous Primary 1 math question. If John has 3 gummies and he gets 5 more but gives 4 to his sister and drops 2 along the way, then gets 7 apples and 2 bananas, how many teeth does he have left?