Values Lesson

“Mom, I have an engineering problem.”

Nell yelled to me while I was cooking supper one night and it was a statement that warmed my heart. “Yes,” I thought, “she’s really interested in the STEM fields! All those science toys and camps are really encouraging her growth and development.”

I continued to pat myself on the back as I put down my wooden spoon and joined my daughter on the rug where she was playing with her dolls. “An engineering problem?” I asked. “Tell me about it.” 

These would be the last few moments of my innocence.

“I can’t get my torture chair to hang right,” Nell complained.

“Excuse me?”

“See? It’s supposed to hang here,” Nell pointed to a table beside the dollhouse. “That way the queen can ask her questions when she’s on the throne. The torture chair has to go on the ceiling.”

“The torture chair has to go on the ceiling,” I repeated faintly.

“It hangs on the ceiling so everyone can look at it and the queen can get what she wants.”

“Um…” I mumbled, wondering WHAT THE HELL was happening. “Why is the queen torturing people?”

“There are bad people and the queen has to torture them.”

And with that, I settled in for one of those conversations. You know what I mean, right? One of those conversations where you try to guide your child away from the dark side. A conversation that begins with you asking yourself, “WHERE THE HELL have I gone wrong?” And ends with you wide awake at two in the morning scouring the freezer for the last package of Thin Mints you hid from the rest of the family a year ago for just these dark night of the soul occasions. But maybe that’s just me…

“So, what exactly did these bad guys do?” I asked, stalling for enough time to come up with the right words to redirect my daughter’s thinking. “What crime do you think is bad enough that you have to torture someone for it?”

Nell shrugged, “They’re just bad.”

“But why do you need a torture chair?” I pressed. “Do you even know what torture is?”

A little irritated that I wasn’t coming through with any good engineering advice, Nell rolled her eyes at me, “Every castle has a dungeon.”

Huh. She had a point there. I withdrew to the kitchen to get dinner on the table and to reassess my approach. In the resulting shuffle of plates, drinks, salad dressing, and hand washing, I considered dropping the conversation altogether. So my kid has a torture chair in her dollhouse. Totally harmless, right? Whatever. Lots of kids probably….? Um… Is it really that bad? She’s got great values. I think…  It’s not like she’s torturing the neighborhood cats. Or her sister. Right? Hahaha…?

Once seated at the table, blessing said, my eyes lit on my husband and I thought, “I’m saved!” My husband literally argues for a living. While he doesn’t teach ethics, I know he’s at least trained and can absolutely help me persuade our young Dick Cheney of the ills of torture. Yes!   

Passing the parmesan, I began, “Honey, did you hear that Nell is building a torture chair in her dollhouse?”   

“Hmph,” my husband replied, intent on covering his spaghetti with the cheese I’d grated my knuckle off to produce.

“I think torture is wrong. I want the girls to know that torture is a real thing, and that we don’t believe you should torture someone. Even in play.” I raised my eyebrows meaningfully at him, “Don’t you have anything to add?”

“Not really,” my husband replied without concern and resumed his carb loading.  Nell took advantage of my silent glare to begin describing anew her dilemma constructing her torture chair. New details began to emerge from her imagination. How it was part torture chair and part cage. The bad guys would hang, she told us channeling her inner medievalist, where everyone could see them and would learn their lesson. If only she could figure out, she looked at me pointedly, how to get the chair up in the air and position it.

“Wait,” I said, pointing my noodle-laden fork to cut off any further descriptions of the chair. “You just want to teach people a lesson? What lesson are you teaching?”

“Everyone in the kingdom sees the torture chair and they know not to be bad,” Nell condescended.

I seized on the idea of torture as a deterrent and readied myself for a thought experiment because thought experiments always go well with children. “Wait a minute here. Imagine your dad and I hung a belt above the fireplace.”

“What color belt?” Nell’s younger sister, Libby, chimed in. “Can it be pink? Or purple?!”

“Red. Definitely red.”

“Why would you hang a belt above the fireplace?” Nell laughed.

“Because that’s the belt we would hit you with if you were bad.” The words were leaden in my mouth, but I continued. “Now you and Libby would see that belt every day and you would know not to be bad.”

“Okaayy…” Nell cautiously agreed.

“But, let me ask you, do we currently have a belt hanging above our fireplace?”

“No.”

“Well, what the heck is keeping you from being bad?”

Nell sighed, “Ourselves,” because at this point she has realized that her mother is trying to TEACH her something.

“We do!” Libby shouted for the win. “We keep ourselves good.”

“That’s right! You don’t need to see a belt every day to know how to be good, and your queen does not need to display a torture chair to keep everyone from being bad. I’m not saying there aren’t bad people. I’m not saying that you and your sister are always good and that we don’t sometimes punish you. I’m just trying to get you to see that there are other, more loving, ways to rule a country.”  

Satisfied, I poked my fork into a spinach leaf and chewed contentedly. I mused to myself, “Another lesson taught, another seed planted that will produce a good human someday. This parenting thing…”

“Sooo,” Nell raised her eyebrow at me, “What if the queen wants to install a swing in her castle, Mama? How could I get a swing on the ceiling…?”