Joke’s on you
Pranking kids is a tempting way to avenge the sleep deprivation, says Sophie White but they have the last laugh when their therapy bill arrives
P“The four-year-old partially pulled down my trousers while I was queueing to pay for groceries with no arm free to stop him”
ranking your kids seems, in the abstract at least, a fun pastime. Especially given what kids tend to put their parents through in terms of prolonged whining and such. However, as a parent, it’s generally frowned upon to try and get back at them. You can’t rain down retribution for the years of sleep deprivation, toddler tantrums and stepping on Lego that they’ve subjected you to. It’s not the done thing, apparently.
I recently stepped on Lego in the shower, which has to be the most parenty thing to ever happen, but retaliation wasn’t an option. Like all parents, I had to suck it up and vent later to Himself. “Our kids are bastards,” I hissed, as we toiled in the kitchen at dinnertime, carrying out their exacting stipulations regarding toast-cutting and which colour bowl was acceptable to them.
Sometimes it feels as though we are the put-upon servants of an erratic, domineering overlord, instead of a nearly five-year-old and his henchman one-year-old sidekick. Therefore pranking, at first, seemed like an innocent enough way to get a dig in for the many times my kids have terrorised me.
Take the time the four-year-old partially pulled down my trousers while I was queueing to pay for groceries, with no arm free to stop him. They were elasticated pants — a rookie mistake, admittedly — but it’s these kinds of micro-humiliations that I presume inspire some parents to turn the tables and play tricks on their children.
The parents in a recent slew of YouTube videos were trying to make their offspring believe they’d been turned invisible. They’d use a blanket and some magic words, then pretend they couldn’t see the child. They even pretended to take a pic and then showed the child a snap staged earlier, that the child wasn’t in, proving that the kid was indeed invisible.
Perhaps there are ways to make this fun for the kid and not give them an instant existential crisis, but these parents were not pulling this off. At all. The footage is unwatchable, with panicked kids screaming, “Where am I?” while their creepy parents lol away. My own efforts in the field of parenting are so abysmal that anything that’s giving even me pause is definitely all kinds of wrong.
While I’ve never gone to this degree of prank, I did scupper myself spectacularly the day I pretended that rice was made of creepy crawlies in a bid to interest the four-year-old in eating this burrito bowl. My logic was skewed. He’s four. He loves bugs but not in his food and thus was born a food fixation, one I may spend thousands in therapy to remedy.