Many years ago, when my children were very young, my husband and I had dinner with a couple whom we adore. They had two older sons and a much younger daughter. They are bright, both professionals , with a wonderful sense of humor. The conversation turned around to parenting issues (as it often will with parents of little ones). The husband, Lloyd told us about how he loved to tease in a playful way his sons. He would do things that were silly to get a laugh. Sometimes he would pull a trick on them, nothing harmful.

What we loved about his philosophy was that he believed we all end up in Freud’s office eventually, blaming our parents for whatever foibles we have. He decided to address that right up front and give his kids reasons to complain. He coined this, “the revenge method of parenting”. We loved it! I have always said that a mother’s job is to embarrass her children, this seemed to fit right in with that. Therefore, we too, adopted the revenge method of parenting.

Over the years, we refer to it, when laughing with our boys. Last night was a great example of this. It seems that recently my youngest son enters the room at the oddest parts of any given conversation. We may be discussing broccoli, but he walks in as we make a comment that would infer a thousand other topics. He has walked into the living room when the television was on, with a commercial for a show on cable we might never watch, but still, the ad is racy. He will then act mortified, that we are watching such trash. This continued through the night last night, so we decided to have fun with it. Every time we heard his foot steps, we would change the conversation to something totally gross. We accused the dog of all kinds of bodily functions. We would start whispering and giggling or engage in a tremendous lip lock. The poor kid was begging us to get a door that locked into the room, to let him move away, something, anything!

I share this with you, not to garner sympathy for my son. I share this, because I wanted to give you an idea of how easy it is to enjoy laughter. We all laughed all night long, my son shared the world’s worst jokes with us and the night flew by. Here is a link to a fun blog I have recently encountered. They use the English language as a tool for humor, in a clean way! Idiocrasies of the English Language.

Oh, and by the way, Thanks Dr. Lloyd Tabb for giving us this great method and the happiness it has brought over the years!