2020 resolutions for my 3-year-old

​We have just returned from a parent-teacher conference, which is a totally reasonable thing for the parents and teacher of a 3-year-old to have. We learned that he got a 3 in “grip-related fine motor skills”, which most of us call “pinching”. On a scale of 1 to 3. In which 3 is inexplicably the lowest. 

It turns out pinching skills are like, the whole story. They’re basically the defining measure of your worth as a parent and a human. You got a 3? Kill yourself. 

Time to step up our game.

Parenting this toddler in 2020 is going to be a breeze, by following these simple rules that everyone in our lives so kindly gives us almost every day, without us even asking them! How helpful!

1. Have him stop pooping his pants. Why didn’t we think of that?
   
2. Get him to eat broccoli. Just tell him that when some random lady at the McDonald’s was a kid, she ate it with no fuss. That should do it. We should get all our healthy eating advice from other people who are at McDonalds at 9:30pm. The nutritional elite, if you will.
   
3. Make sure he plays outside six hours a day. This is reasonable because we don’t have jobs or anything to do, and live in the woods. Also most kids like to do the same thing for six hours every day.
   
4. Don’t be helicopter parents and hover over him. But carefully monitor everything he eats, touches, looks at, watches, says, hears, feels, and does. But without watching him. 
   
5. Capture every moment! You’re rocking your baby, and babies don’t keep. Savor these moments by taking photos of everything, but don’t use your phone because you shouldn’t be on your phone in front of you kid. Your kid shouldn’t even see a phone until he’s 9. Plus if you share the photos on Facebook, he’ll definitely get murdered. But if you don’t, do you even care about him? Maybe just get a professional photographer to capture each moment of your day. You should have matching outfits (not too matching) and a letter board with a pun on it. An ORIGINAL pun, for God’s sake. 
   
6. Just tell him what to do and make him do it - that’s why everyone our age is so emotionally stable and satisfied with their lives: because we were yelled at. Listening to children and treating them as people will ruin them for life. Also, don’t ever tell him what to do and definitely don’t make him do it. What is wrong with you? This is why your kid pinches with the strength of a 2-year-old AT BEST.
   
7. Do not ever let him watch an iPad or a TV. Just like adults, kids should never be entertained passively and they should be actively playing at all times. But silently and not irritating anyone or making a mess. Do you think Melissa and Doug let their kid watch TV? Maybe he can silently play with an abacus while all the people snarling because they need to sit near a smaller person in a public space watch TV on their phones. Not a plastic abacus though. Jesus Christ.
   
8. Don’t buy him any of these new-fangled toys. Instead, buy him things he hates! Other people will buy him the loud toys anyway and foist them on you, but at least this way, your kid likes those people better than you. You can create detailed Pinterest-based activities for them to practice their essential pinching skills like 4 hours a day so they don’t get behind in writing and become unemployable forever by the age of 6, but like, no pressure. These four hours should not overlap with your six outside hours, by the way. That is cheating. Maybe quit your job and start a pinching-based Pinterest page.
   
9. Give him milk. But whatever you do, don’t give him milk. Other foods we must give him but absolutely should not give him under any circumstances are chicken, fish, cheese, pasta, bread, eggs, Cheerios, yogurt, hot dogs, grapes, and anything else that he likes at all.
   
10. Hug him, love him, and be there unconditionally. As long as it’s conditional.

See? That’s only 10 things. It leaves us plenty of time to start teaching him Mandarin but, like, with no pressure and in a way that’s breezy and fun and centered on his emotional goals? Do they have Paw Patrol in Mandarin but, like, not on a TV? Anyway.

May your 2020 be red-dye-free and full of deeply advanced pinching skills. May your entire year be a 1 out of 3. 1 being the best.