The other day, my youngest son was quite angry with me for taking away his computer privileges. It was a consequence for him not doing his homework the day before. It’s the old “work before play” idea. If you don’t get your work done, you don’t get to play.<\/p>\n
He did not agree with this theory at all, and tried everything he could think of to get out from under the punishment.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, all I could do was laugh.<\/p>\n
It’s a problem that I’ve been fighting for quite some time. For some inexplicable reason, when kids yell at me, I laugh. I don’t know why, but the sight of an irate 9-year old berating me always strikes me as being incredibly funny.<\/p>\n
I understand that laughing is completely inappropriate. I know that being laughed at when you’re angry just makes you angrier. I just can’t help myself.<\/p>\n
What’s worse is that my laughing always causes the brother of the angry child (whoever it is) to start laughing. Even my wife starts to smile a bit. Soon, the angry child finds himself yelling at a family of people, all trying to hide their smiles. The more the yelling happens, though, the funnier it seems, and the more the family laughs.<\/p>\n
It’s got to be quite the horrible experience, and it’s one I should put an end to.<\/p>\n
Honestly, though, I doubt it’s going to get any better. I mean, even as I write this, I can’t stop chuckling.<\/p>\n
It’s a problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I believe this is my largest parenting challenge: uncontrollable laughter at inappropriate moments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[118,122,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-yu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2138\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}