There’s a new course in town.  It’s called High Performance Parenting and the classes are now being taught at my house.  My Little Fella is the instructor.

Even after years of college with the psychology courses, education courses, parenting classes, etc., that are designed to help you learn how to conduct your life in your future, very few of us are prepared for parenting.  What none of us ever realizes in the heat of that single particular passionate moment is that when that little sucker comes out nine months later, THAR AIN’T NO INSTRUCTIONS IN THE PACKAGE AND IT DIDN’T COME FROM WAL-MART so there are no return policies (unless the Department of Family and Children Services gets into your act!).

No warranties and no directions are issued when that little worm is born.  But from the instant that parents find out that a baby is in the offing, all Heck breaks loose!  Your life is no longer your own. You are owned, body, soul and life insurance, by the little booger that hopefully will become the jewel in your parental crown.  On-The-Job Training classes should begin several months prior to the birth of the baby, ‘cause once he/she/it gets here, there won’t be time for any classes, reading, sexy glances, fond memories, clean clothes, baths, etc. until the child is..., well, no, he still needs you then, is..., no, that’s too soon, too, the child is...  well, never again will there be time for anything you ever thought about accomplishing.

As long as the parental cord is intact (that’s the one that the doctor sews to your heart strings with invisible thread just before he/she cuts the umbilical cord), that child will need you forever.  She will also guide your life forever.  He will require your undivided attention for no less than 27 hours a day, and will, in most cases, never let up on you until you are beyond the exhaustion line drawn in the sand.  And only High Performance Parents (HPP) can keep up with them. 

One way to keep a child interested in what she are doing is to keep changing what she is doing every few minutes.  If she is happy, you get to keep doing your own thing.  Children have such short attention spans that they are like finely tuned funny cars (the drag racing kind), bouncing from one interest to the next in 2.4 seconds.  I’ve seen High Performance Parents that can rev that child up so high that he will have gone from Zero to Spoiled in six months, or less.  Check out the kid’s room.  If there is not enough room to move in there, and there is a “Santa’s Outlet Mall” sign on the door, the kid may have gone from 0 - Spoiled in less than six months and you have displayed one of the symptoms of HPP.

Characteristics of HPPs range from babbling baby talk at the most inappropriate times to making weird excuses to your bowling buddies for dropping out of the league.  Other symptoms are discovered when a parent volunteers or “gets” volunteered to perform certain tasks like:  baseball, basketball, football, or soccer coach; den or troop leader; choir director; room mom or dad; designated driver for the gang on the trip to the skating rink, etc., ad infinitum.  Reasoning behind this inability to say “NO” is connected to that invisible heart string -- you want to be with your child and know who he/she is with at all times.  Either that or you have that dread Type A personality trait that leads you to believe that “no one will do the job like I will, so I’ll have to do it myself.”  Whether Type A’s believe it or not, even Type B’s are capable of “doing it” themselves, too.

An HPP, in his/her earnest efforts to be all things to all people, occasionally has to forfeit time with the kid in favor of more time satisfying the boss’ wishes.  Try to explain to big brown or blue eyes that are swimming in tears why you had to work overtime and therefore missed her only homerun of the year and you find yourself wanting to compensate those baby eyes in some way.  WE’B’TOYS sells lots of great ways (remember the child’s floor).  When in doubt, guiltily throw money at the problem.

The day will come, however, when you’ve thrown so much money at the problems of life that there is too little space left to walk in his room around the acres of thumb-sized toys residing in various quadrants of the carpet.  “Don’t step on my micro-machine ‘StarTrekWarsTurtlesX-MenNextGeneration’ stuff, Mom!” he howls as you race to find something for him to wear in the cleanest pile of dirty clothes on the other side of the bed where he strips and leaves his garments.  It’s required by law that the clothing get dumped there daily, in spite of parental thunder to the contrary.  Until the day finally arrives when that pair of blue eyes that he’s seen under a baseball hat for the last seven years is finally wearing mascara and batts those lashes furiously at him in biology class.

Suddenly, there’s not enough water and soap in the supermarket to keep him, his body and his clothing clean enough for the next day’s stint in biology lab. Trying to keep up with a prepubescent boy’s dozen clothing changes each day will send even the high performingest parent into a tailspin.  That tailspin continues as an ever-downward spiral to the point that the HPP self-examines with “What am I doing this for?  She thinks I’m the stupidest thing in the check-out lane!” 

The parental psyche will then remain in the basement, even for HPPs, for several years, unloved, unkempt, and unnurtured, until the day finally dawns that the offspring leaves home, gets married, or has a kid.  Shortly after the arrival of one of these monumental events, Mom and Dad suddenly undergo brain transplants and get “smart” again.  This pattern has repeated itself thousands of times even unto the present, with each succeeding generation saying, “But that won’t happen to me and my kids!  We’re always going to have a very open line of communication!”