The 2nd law of parenting

Sir Isaac Newton.
I cannot compete with this guy.

I guess I had some notion that the day-to-day stuff would get easier. We have routines, it’s the same thing every day. You wake up, you get dressed, you brush your teeth, you eat breakfast, you get coats and shoes on and you get in the car and go. That’s, what, maybe 30 minutes of total value-added activity? Perhaps 15 minutes if you are under the gun? If the kids aren’t up already, I wake them at 7:00, and they’re usually up well before that. So we should be out the door at 7:30, right? So why are we sometimes struggling to leave by 8:30?

I’ll tell you why. It’s because, the actual process is: wake the kids up – beg and scream and cajole – get dressed – beg and scream and cajole – eat breakfast – beg and scream and cajole, and so on. Basically, weekday parenting is herding cats. Two cats. But very independent minded and obstinate ones.

We’ve been doing this for over two years, so by my calculations that’s something like 500 attempts at getting out the door and into the car. After 500 goes at this, shouldn’t our reasonably intelligent children understand that, once the shoes and coats are on, the next step is to proceed directly to the car, get in, and get in the booster seat? And yet, opening that door to the garage is akin to unleashing juvenile German shepherds from their travel cage into the room – within seconds, toys and bikes are out, messes made, and coats and clothes are dirty. Do I really have to explain that, no, today is not the one exception day where we can play with sidewalk chalk before going to school?

I have a theory to explain this behavior. The children, it seems, are more bound by the laws of physics than by the more human motives of rationality and process. Newton’s second law of physics is centered on entropy – the general trend from order to chaos. The children, it seems, are contributors to entropy on a grand scale. Observe the process of putting on coats 500 times and you can easily see how my children are marching us ever closer to the heat death of the universe.

That door to the garage isn’t just a portal, it’s a vacuum. We all know that nature hates a vacuum, and as the door opens, you can almost hear the whoosh of young-child mass being sucked in. Getting into the car isn’t a controlled reaction, it’s an implosion, with all the destruction that entails.

Watch any Disney movie, and you’ll learn that love is the strongest force in the world. I can tell you that Andrea and I love our children with great strength indeed. But parenting is no match for Sir Isaac Newton- the universe itself conspires against our parental attempts at order and routine.