PREST: Parenting tips from a post-apocalyptic dad

I had children at a younger age than many of my friends, granting me status as the sage guru in all parenting matters.

And by “I had children” I of course mean “my wife had children while I used my cellphone to time her contractions and check baseball scores.” It was important to me that my children came into the world in a loving, peaceful environment that prioritized fatherly involvement and good on-base percentage.

Regardless, with two children now under my care and more than five years of daddy duty under my belt, my friends who are just now having babies or planning on starting families in the near future often come to me with questions, particularly about adding a second child to the mix.

The short answer is it’s like living in a rowdy bar – there’s singing, crying, punching, dancing, lots of yelling and every once in a while someone whips a bottle at your head.

I do my best to share my knowledge, but sometimes it’s hard to recall all the little details and even harder to turn them into advice that people who don’t yet have children can relate to.

It recently hit me that it might be best to offer my advice in an easy-to-understand way that is accessible to younger folks: action movies. So here are my greatest tips for taming wild youngsters, broken down into movie references. Note that I am a parent of two young children so my movie watching basically ended five years ago. The one exception is the new Star Wars movie but I didn’t think that was appropriate given the daddy issues that seem to permeate that whole series.

“Luke, I am your father. Eat your peas … or die.”

I don’t like using force. Here, however, is what works for me:

Tip 1, from The Book of Eli: wander the desert

This movie is what initially inspired this column. About a month ago my two sons and I had a whole day to kill and we just loaded up a backpack with some supplies and headed out the door with no real plan. The weather wasn’t nuclear holocaust horrible but it wasn’t exactly nice either, and we hit a couple of playgrounds that were basically deserted. Then the rain hit and we ended up hunkered down under a small overhang, digging into our rations and waiting out the storm.

For some reason it reminded me of Denzel Washington’s character in The Book of Eli, striding and surviving through a post-apocalyptic world. Except we barely saw another soul so I didn’t have to rummage through my backpack for my sawed-off shotgun.
If we had been cooped up at home the boys would have been fighting each other like bandits going after the last piece of nuke-charred crow meat. Instead we wandered the wilds in what became one of my favourite days spent with the boys.

Tip 2, from Speed: don’t slow down

This one is an extension of Tip 1. Trouble starts when things slow down, just as it does for the character brilliantly portrayed by Keanu Reeves who finds himself on a bus that will blow up if it dips below 50 miles per hour.

Pop quiz hotshot: my wife works all day every Saturday and I need to keep my two boys from blowing each other up for an entire day. What do I do?!

I’m a dude, so I have trouble coming up with creative crafts or improvised tea parties to keep the boys occupied. That’s a problem, because I’ve found when life slows down, many things – tempers, kerosene-filled novelty thermometers, my faith in humanity – tend to blow up.

For much of the year, however, Saturdays were also soccer days and so the boys and I barely had time to stop for one minute as we dropped my wife off at work, raced home for lunch, zoomed to the soccer field, played our hearts out, zoomed back to grab my wife, wolfed down supper, threw the kids into bed, then decapitated Dennis Hopper. It was the perfect plan for keeping things moving all day.

It doesn’t have to be an organized sport, but keeping the action moving is a great way to avoid catastrophe. And it never hurts to recruit Sandra Bullock.

Tip 3, from The Hunger Games: feed the people

This one is pretty simple – hunger is bad. If you don’t keep everyone properly fed and watered, the youth of the family will be singled out and forced to battle to the death with swords and poison bees.
This is not a fair system: I’d like to think that when my boys choose to battle to the death, they are exercising their own free will. Or they just really want that piece of Lego.

Anyway, keep snacks with you at all times and you may avoid the more severe crossbow injuries.

I hope these tips help. May the odds be ever in your favour. And when they’re not, may the hospital be ever in your speed dial.

Andy Prest is the sports editor for the North Shore News and writes a biweekly humour/lifestyle column. He can be reached via email at [email protected].