How to Infect Your Spawn with Deadly Diseases So They Can Live

July 11, 2017 Five Smiling Fish

One of the biggest parenting controversies of this day and age is whether or not to vaccinate your offspring.

For those of you that don’t know what vaccines are (I’ll be honest, I had to look it up too), it is injecting babies with weakened versions of serious diseases so their tiny immune systems learn how to kill them. It’s like building up an immunity to iocane powder. Take a little bit at a time until your body can handle it.

There are two sides to this whole concept. Either you are for shooting up your child with science created magic disease water or you are willing to let millions of unvaccinated kids (as well as your own) die along the way.

Science has created an impressive amount of vaccines, such as for measles, mumps, the flu, polio, and scarlet fever to name a few. Some suspect that along with these lifesaving medicines, they have also inadvertently caused problems such as autism, Down syndrome, and gluten intolerance.

It goes without saying that you humans get quite impassioned about the subject. I’ve rarely seen anything more divisive in the parenting world.

So what is a conscientious parent supposed to do? It just so happens that there is a middle ground between two very extreme answers to the vaccine question. It’s something that has been done for centuries with mixed results.

Infect your child, but not by giving them shots of lab generated chemicals. Oh no. Infect them the way nature intended by exposing them to all sorts of ill people. Here on some tips on properly infecting your offspring:

1. Make them be around sick people— a lot. The more exposure they have to the ill, the more diseases they will contract and then become immune to.

2. Don’t let them wash their hands. Washing hands kills more germs than anything. If the goal is to infect them, best not to let them at the soap.

3. Take a trip to the CDC and snatch some of the more infectious diseases. Let’s face it, most people nowadays only get the flu on a regular basis. To make sure your child is vaccinated against the most deadly and infectious diseases, go right to the source and rub them all over the kid.

4. If the hospital or the CDC won’t let your little terror in with the super sick people, there is an alternative; let them play with biohazard waste. I’m not saying let them romp in the sewers, rather, let them fiddle with old band aids, used tissues, or cough rags from the infirm.

However you infect your child, be sure to give them plenty of time to build up those antibodies. It may also be a good idea to keep a cure for all the diseases, just in case your little walking snot rag is defective. Also, remember all of that hand sanitizer I suggested you get? Make sure you use it yourself while you are vaccinating!

Vaccinate!

Azra

***Disclaimer***Azra has been around children for centuries. While not having any of his own, part of being an exiled angel means blending in on earth. As he traveled the earth, he picked up on a lot of parenting practices across the globe. This blog is meant to share his parenting wisdom with a new generation. And to win a bet.

*Note: any advice given is meant to be satirical and not to be taken literally. Please do not exercise it upon any living being, child or otherwise.*

How Routine is Killing Your Kid

June 27, 2017 Five Smiling Fish

All of the parenting books these days make a big deal about getting your spawn on a routine. These misguided authors insist that kids need to do the same mindless tasks (like brushing their teeth, napping, bathing, making their beds, and eating) day in and day out. Supposedly this will help them build good, healthy habits that will last them until they are legally able to take responsibility for their own actions.

I cannot tell you how much I disagree with this tactic.

Routine is an enemy! It will lull your ankle biters into a false sense of security! When they are least expecting it, there will be no bed to make and their routine will be completely out the window. Your now adult spawn will be completely broken and not have the faintest idea of how to function. There will be whole asylums filled with sad, broken humans unable to cope without their pre-established routine.

Not to mention all of the bad habits that are out there, lurking, waiting for your offspring to fall into them. No, it is best to keep the little germ incubators away from habits and routine all together.

Now, we’ve already agreed that the point of parenting is to ensure the continuation of the human species. In order for that to happen, the generations to come must be adaptable. Routine is the opposite of adaptable.

So, how can we prevent our mini humans from falling into the false sense of security that is routine?

1. Make the very concept of habits as horrible as possible. Be creative in convincing that if your offspring should be so unlucky as to fall into a routine or develop a habit, they will expire in an incredibly gruesome way. Use images of robots or extinct animals to drive the point home.

2. Shake up daily activities by not doing anything at the same time. In fact, it’s best to disregard all notion of time. It is a social construct that is centered around building routine. Resist! Being random at all hours is one of the best defenses.

3. Reject any attempt to schedule your child. This includes schooling, play dates, and doctors’ appointments. If you can have walk-in appointments you can maintain a random lifestyle.

4. If you see your snot-eater starting a routine, stop it as soon as possible. This can mean depriving them of their habit tools (tooth brushes, washcloths, beds, watches, etc.), taking them on a spontaneous errand or trip, or even punishing them for their habit building.

Keep it random, fellow parental units!

Azra

*Note: any advice given is meant to be satirical and not to be taken literally. Please do not exercise it upon any living being, child or otherwise.*

When to Let Your Kid Dress Themselves and How To Responsibly Avoid Them In Public

May 30, 2017 Five Smiling Fish

Fashion is finicky. Clothing choices transform a lot for the human species. With garb drastically changing not only from culture to culture, but also time periods and human ages, it’s so hard to get it right.

As a parent, you are obligated to ensure your offspring is properly dressed. Or are you?

Consider this: allowing your spawn to decide in the manner they are dressed teaches self-sufficiency and boosts confidence. Which, if you have read my previous blogs on the subjects, are great things for your rug rat to have.

A good fashion sense takes years to develop, though in many cases, it doesn’t develop at all. That would be all well and good, except for one tiny thing. Society judges you on your appearance and nothing else.

So, for the sake of creating a self-sufficient and confident human, you are left with letting your undeveloped monster choose the striped tutu over the dinosaur costume with the mismatching cowboy boots and ugly sweater vest. Which would be fine except you have to be seen and associated with them.

What is a parent to do?

Avoid them. Avoid being seen with them until their sense of fashion either comes out of hiding or until it is socially acceptable for them to be in public by themselves. Here are a couple of tips:

· Keep them locked up and out of the public eye. This approach is what I like to call the Rapunzel tactic. It only works for so long before they want to be let out and your counter measures (locks, towers, vague threats of the outside world, etc) fail.

· Watch them from afar. Keep a certain amount of distance from your child while in public. When they call for you, look away and ignore them. Soon, they will learn not to address you when other people are within eyesight.

· Hire someone to be seen in public with your offspring. Depending on how much they charge, you can also have them dress like your child, thus absolving you of your public parental image. Problem solved.

Fashionably yours,

Azra

*Note: any advice given is meant to be satirical and not to be taken literally. Please do not exercise it upon any living being, child or otherwise.*

Fostering Responsibility Part 1: Cleaning is for Kids

May 2, 2017 Five Smiling Fish

Part of being a successful human is the ability to take responsibility for yourself, to pull your own weight in society. There is also a time honored tradition to get someone else to handle that shit so you don’t have to. If you have kids, then you can kill two birds with one stone: teach them to be responsible by shirking your own duties.

How, you ask? It’s a rather simple concept called delegation. Even though it is easy, depending on how you execute the plan, the outcomes will vary—meaning you can either choose to teach your offspring the things you will delegate or just give it to them and have confidence they will figure it out along the way.

The spin depends on what sort of emotional trauma you want to inflict on your spawn.

So. What kind of things can you comfortably delegate to your little one? My initial answer is everything and anything, but for those of you who lack imagination, there will be a few different posts on the sorts of things you can delegate to your spawn and what sort of reaction they evoke.

Today’s delegation topic is maid duty.

Many parents already have modified versions of this with chore charts and the like. It’s a good start, but it should be amped up. Taking out the garbage is one thing, but the kid should also know the ins and outs of recycling, landscaping upkeep (bonus points for winter and summer gardens), bathroom sanitizing, dish scrubbing and polishing, floor maintenance, and dust removal, to name a few. Now, I’m not talking about the once a week you have to do this and go about your merry way, sort of maid duty. I’m talking daily-get-the-rubber-gloves-out kind of detailed cleaning. If you can’t see your reflection in your baseboards, the kid isn’t trying hard enough.

There’s also some question as to how young parents can start their offspring on doing chores. My response is, if they can hold a rag, they can clean.

Don’t take it easy on them. Little humans are springy and resilient. They can crawl under houses and exterminate rats. They can re-shingle a roof. They can repair garage doors.

The best part is that you can let them learn all about responsibility by letting them take on yours.

Smart parenting right there.

Azra

*Note: any advice given is meant to be satirical and not to be taken literally. Please do not exercise it upon any living being, child or otherwise.*

Conformity over Autonomy: What To Do If Your Kid Is The Weird One

March 21, 2017 Five Smiling Fish

Not many creatures on earth tolerate differences in their own species. For instance, white ravens are often killed by their dark-feathered brethren, all because of the color of their plumage!

Humans are just as vicious, if not more cruel. Differences between humans are seen as weakness. They will either kill or ostracize the ones that don’t fit in.

Which is why it is absolutely vital that your offspring fit in with the other human spawn. Remember, if they do, then, unlike the poor white ravens, your pint sized person will not be pecked to death or worse! Not fitting in could mean that they will never find a mate and become a burden on their fellow humans without actively perpetuating the human race.

If your child survives into adulthood and adds its own spawn to the species, you win the game!

The ideology of conformity over autonomy begins with you: the parental figure. Here are some tips to help you stamp out any attempt your child makes towards individualism.

1. Aim for Average. Overachievers and underachievers alike draw attention to themselves. If you reinforce that average is the way to go in studies, sports, in life, it will keep your little animal firmly in the middle of the pack. It’ll also have the added bonus of not putting undue pressure to achieve on them or on you.

2. Teach them from a young age that being different is bad and if they are different, they should be ashamed. This will keep them focused on fitting in.

3. Friends. This is a tricky one. Friends should make your child feel like they belong, however, they do have the unfortunate side effect of influencing your little blank slate. Be sure whatever friends your offspring manages to attract embody the essence of average and don’t stand out. If you can remember their names and what they look like, they are not average enough.

Remember- Conformity. It’s for their own good.

Stay mediocre, my friends.

Azra

*Note: any advice given is meant to be satirical and not to be taken literally. Please do not exercise it upon any living being, child or otherwise.*

Is It Childproofing Or Just Removing Consequences?

March 14, 2017 Five Smiling Fish

As a parent, you are naturally concerned for your kid’s well-being. You want them to be safe. Many parents take the safety thing to an unhealthy level by locking up or securing basic items in their homes such as cabinets, light sockets, even toilets! Modern manufacturers have caught onto this trend and have jumped on the bandwagon themselves by making certain consumables and sundries impossible to open.

My question is why? Not only does childproofing your living space complicate adult lives unnecessarily, it prevents your little snot tornado from learning that actions have consequences. That latter part has the potential for catastrophic outcomes. If your offspring doesn’t learn about consequences, then it will impact their ability to adapt, their integrity will be nonexistent, their entitlement will be through the roof. In short, they will grow into entitled brats that no one will want to be around. This means the chances of them fulfilling their purpose of continuing the species is severely compromised.

“But Azra, if they got into bleach it could kill my child wouldn’t that also compromise their purpose on earth?”

The answer to that is both yes and no. Yes, if your mini-you got into the household cleaners and drank enough of it you would, in fact, fail at parenting. No, because as far as them contributing to the survival of the species, well? They drank bleach. At that point, it is natural selection and it is better they didn’t reproduce.

My point is, by childproofing the world to keep your rugrat safe, you are really doing more harm than good. Sheltering your kid from the world is not going to let them operate well in it.

My advice is to let them get into things. Let them explore. Let them experience the consequences of their actions first hand. I promise they will be much more interesting as adults if they are missing limbs.

Live dangerously!

Azra

*Note: any advice given is meant to be satirical and not to be taken literally. Please do not exercise it upon any living being, child or otherwise.*

Raising Your Offspring; Why I’m The Only Expert You Should Listen To

January 24, 2017 Five Smiling Fish

It’s the age of information and as such, there is a ton of parenting advice on this interwebs thing. While it may seem like a good idea to follow all of these recommendations, let me be the first to say:

Don’t do it.

Don’t take parenting advice from strangers online! You don’t know where they’ve been or what their real agenda is. They could be secret agents out to create the next super villain and your kid could be their unwitting puppet.

I know what you are thinking. “But Azra, You’re a stranger and you’re online. Why should we listen to you?”

I’ll tell you why, newbie parent.

Parental units don’t need new and improved ways of raising their little tyrants. They need the tried and true methods of the past to ensure their offspring are the winners of the game called life (not that board game where everyone gets a car— the bigger, higher stakes extravaganza where losing means dying— game).

I am one of the few creatures on earth that can give not only a historically accurate advice on the matter of raising mini humans, but also a completely objective view. I say objective for a couple of reasons:

1. I am not, in fact, a human. I’m an angel— a Grigori to be more specific. One of the many reasons I was created was to help humans. While child rearing was not my original forte, I consider my time on earth watching the generations of man slip by a more than good enough resume.

2. I do not, nor have I ever, had any kids. Besides the whole “angels don’t have kids” theory (which is a complete lie!), I just never found that certain someone to have my mixed DNA clone with. This ensures that I am not biased because of how I may have raised any offspring.

3. I did have a hand in making sure my nephew, Ryan, grew up. He’s not human either, but that does give me more of an advantage since we had to pretend that we were. Because we were always on the move, I never committed to any one parenting style, choosing instead to remain fluid and flexible.

The sole purpose of me standing on this interwebs soapbox is to help you silly humans guarantee the future of your entire race and that it isn’t completely ruined by some online hack.

Also, I have a bet going with Ryan.

So what do you say? Shall we explore the wonderful world of parenting together?

Looking forward to lecturing you,

Azra

* Disclaimer* Azra has been around children for centuries. While not having any of his own, part of being an exiled angel means blending in on earth. As he traveled the globe, he picked up on a lot of parenting practices across the globe. This blog is meant to share his parenting wisdom with a new generation. And to win a bet.

*Note* Any advice given is meant to be satirical and not to be taken literally. Please do not exercise it upon any living being, child or otherwise.*

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