Passing the local park on one of my infrequent morning runs, I overheard a mother issuing an instruction to her child.
“I’d like you to get off the slide now, Ben darling, because we need to get to the supermarket before we go for a play with Tom, and if we leave it too late, Isabel will miss her sleep and she’ll be grumpy all afternoon, which means we won’t be able to play with the new Lego you got for your birthday.”
I say “an instruction” but, really, it was a soliloquy. Of Shakespearean proportions. Because the only person this mum was talking to was herself. Ben, who I’m guessing was about three, heard only this: “I’d like blah, blah, blah, Ben, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Lego, blah, blah, blah.”
I know this because I’ve spent a decade negotiating, reprimanding and instructing with the verbosity of a parliamentary filibuster (the pinnacle of my parenting success was shouting at my kids not to shout at each other). No matter how convincing my arguments or witty my rhetoric, it didn’t work. Teeth weren’t brushed, shoes weren’t put on, towels were left on the floor (although that may be genetic).
Then last year I had a breakthrough. I chanced upon the smartest, most effective and under-publicised weapon in the parenting arsenal: the full stop.
I rarely read or listen to parenting experts – the notion of any parent being an expert seems oxymoronic – but I do like this chap called Nigel Latta. He swears a lot and advocates padlocking naughty kids in their rooms. Anyway, he’s a huge fan of the full stop.
Latta reckons the humble comma lies behind the conflict between kids and parents. Mums, he says, are the worst offenders, using one comma after another to explain to their kids why they shouldn’t stab their friends with sticks or why they’re not allowed on Facebook. Anything after a comma, he says, is nagging.
As a smug and frequent user of the semi-colon, I knew Latta couldn’t be referring to me; my directives might be an octave higher than necessary, but they were logical and perfectly punctuated, segueing neatly from an admonishment to an exhortation for improvement. The problem had to be the kids.
Yet my husband regularly uses full stops. “Clean your soccer boots,” he says to the eldest. And she does. “Eat with your knife and fork or you’ll be eating dinner alone in your bedroom,” he tells the youngest, who did end up in her bedroom, but only once.
So I tried it. “Empty your school bag,” I instructed, turning away so I couldn’t rant about furry lunch boxes and how lost school notes would mean missing out on the zoo excursion. Bugger me if it didn’t work.
I’ve learnt more about the power of punctuation in the past year than in 20 years working with words. Doubly effective is a “no” followed by a full stop – as in, “No, you can’t have a Kit Kat.” Rather than, “No, you can’t have a Kit Kat because it’s almost dinner and you had lollies yesterday, and it’s important we make healthy choices, so if you’d like a carrot stick…”
Full stops can also be non-verbal. In my less wordy world, a sharp frown has regained its force, and a silent point towards a homework book is far less combative than a command.
If you’re keen to give it a whirl, here’s an extra tip: full stops can be preceded by silent words. As in, “No, [you ungrateful little brat] you can’t have an iPod.” Or, like the publishing phenomenon, “Go [the f**k] to sleep.”
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