How to Pick Your Battles with Your Children

The thing about kids is that you’ve got to pick your battles. However, knowing which of these battles to actually pick can be extremely difficult to figure out. Here are a few helpful questions to ask yourself when trying to make such a hard decision:

Will whatever the child is trying to do harm them in any way?

Will whatever the child is trying to do harm you in any way?

Will the harm it would cause you not actually hurt that much but still leave some type of physical scar you could eventually point to and use to guilt your child out of putting you into a nursing home?

Will whatever the child is trying to do harm them but make for an awesome viral video that would definitely bring in enough ad revenue to both cover their medical bills and put them through Yale?

Are you also really eager to see what happens next on Spidey and His Amazing Friends even though your child has technically already reached her limit of two episodes per day?

Does Liam’s dad let him do it?

Does Liam’s mom let him do it?

Does Liam’s mom let him do it but only because Liam’s dad lets him do it, and they’re going through a tough divorce right now that has left both of them terrified of getting permanently branded as The Not Fun Parent?

Has your child been preparing for the battle by quietly amassing forces in Europe’s Ardennes region between Luxembourg and Belgium in a last-ditch offensive effort to prevent your forces from having access to the port of Antwerp, and also presumably to get you to lighten up on that whole “no iPad on weeknights” rule?

Are you tired, just oh so very tired, like in a way that now feels permanent and existential and makes you physically wilt upon realizing you have only been raising this child for about two years and will probably spend the next four to 62 years periodically engaged in minor to major fights with them, so yeah, whatever, maybe they can just have Twizzlers for dinner tonight?

Does the phrase “You can pick your friends, and you can pick your battles, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friends’ battles’ noses” mean anything helpful, or are we just misremembering a somewhat decent SNL sketch from, like, 40 years ago?

Will any reinforcements arrive for the battle in the near future, ideally in the form of the child’s other parent who you can dump the entire situation on because they are just better at this whole “discipline” thing than you are?

Is there a way to circumvent the whole idea of a “battle” with your child in the first place, given that you love them more than anything in the world and genuinely hope to avoid developing any sort of adversarial relationship with them? Don’t you both ultimately just want the same thing, which is for the two of you to be happy and not lose any limbs thanks to an easily preventable accident stemming from your shortsighted decision to put the cheese grater in a cabinet your child can reach? Can’t the two of you just stop being so antagonistic for once and realize you’re on the same team? And how has no parent until you come up with such a brilliant and groundbreaking idea like this before? It’s all just so simpl– Oh, geez, OK, he has the cheese grater. Jimmy, put it down. Put it DOWN. JIMMY YOU PUT THAT CHEESE GRATER DOWN RIGHT NOW!

Alright, so this is admittedly only somewhat related to the “pick your battles” conundrum, but does anyone have any good recommendations for where one could purchase a new cheese grater?