It occurs to me that I have acquired a great deal of, for lack of a better word, Kid Tricks over the almost twenty-six years I’ve been a mom.

I’d say expertise, but that is definitely the wrong word. Expertise makes me think of a skilled mechanic who can always fix your car. I most definitely cannot claim to always know the right way to handle a kid.

The fact that none of my kids are known serial killers is not an endorsement of my methods. Because if any of them do, in fact, turn out to be a serial killer (or heaven forfend, more than one of them wind up doing their best Silence of the Lambs impersonation) it’s not my fault. They were raised better than that.

So the best I have is that in a limited number of situations I have figured out the hack that worked at least most of the time. And I thought I’d share.

I would have called this “Hacking Your Kids” but that would have made it sound like that Silence of the Lambs thingy.

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Today’s Hack: Getting your kids to behave in church.

It doesn’t have to be church, actually; just any place where they need to sit quietly for a bit and where you’re not forcibly detained, like on a plane. The scenario: pre-schooler gets rowdy, and your next move is to pick him up and remove him from the premises before he goes completely ballistic.

It took me a while to figure out what the next step needed to be. At first I’d walk with the wee one around the grounds of the church, figuring that stretching his legs could not be a bad thing.

But then I realized that there was no downside to pitching a fit in church, as the result was always a pleasant walk around a pleasant church campus. Heck, *I* was starting to like doing that, too.

So we launched Phase II: kid pitched fit, kid was promptly taken to the car and buckled into his seat. No book, no toy, nothing. Just sitting. I was in the driver’s seat, both literally and figuratively, with the a/c on as required, and a book and a high tolerance for an outraged four-year-old.

That got old for him really fast, and so the ‘pitch a fit in church’ gambit was promptly abandoned.

Note: you might ask about the use of the cry room at church. I hate the cry room. No one tries to enforce any peace and quiet in there, so it’s just a license to riot. You may as well just give up and go to Chuck E. Cheese at 9 am on Sunday morning.

© E. Stocking Evans 2015