I don’t like kids. I have never liked kids. Even as a kid, I didn’t like kids. Okay, certain children can give my heartstrings a tug sometimes. One time I went browsing in a home furnishings store, and this little kid and his mom came in at about the same time, and the kid stood in front of the store’s resident cat for about ten minutes and watched it taking a nap, and the owner leaned over the counter and said, “You can go ahead and pet her. She likes people,” and the kid said, “No, thanks. I don’t want to bother her,” and I wanted to distract the kid’s mother with an incredible bargain on a lamp and stuff her child (and, for that matter, the friendly feline) into my bag and dash out of the store in possession of this well-behaved and thoughtful little boy. Most of the time, though, they just work my nerves. They whine. They cry. They spill. They puke. They kick their little feet into the back of my seat. Even babies, cuter on balance than their larger counterparts (and easier to control, since either they can’t walk, or they can’t walk quickly enough to chug one of those yummy bottles under the sink before a responsible adult catches up to them), don’t really do it for me. Again, some of them look positively edible, like my cousin’s oldest daughter; she recently turned two and has probably started raising all sorts of hell, but as an infant, she ruled – incredibly cute, blissfully quiet. No matter how adorable the baby, though, the rapturous squealing and cooing don’t burst up out of me like they seem to out of other women. Fortunately, none of my close friends has procreated yet, so I haven’t yet had to feign interest in the burps and gurgles of their offspring, but I dread the day that someone in my inner circle announces a pregnancy – if you’ve seen that Sprint commercial where the woman looks at the baby picture and grimaces and says, “As a matter of fact, I have seen cuter babies,” then you have a rough idea of what lies ahead for me when my friends start having kids.

Of course, kids can’t control what parents they end up with . . . and I have to say that, when I find myself muttering the words “goddamn ankle-biter” under my breath, nine times out of ten I blame the ankle-biter’s parents for the disturbance. I don’t have kids, and I don’t plan to have kids for quite some time, if ever, so I feel hesitant about passing judgment on parents because I won’t exactly excel at child-rearing myself. (“Mom? May I please have a glass of milk?” “Get it yourself. And keep it down in there – Springer is on.”) On the other hand, a number of parents seem to feel that museums, art galleries, weddings, and crowded Italian restaurants constitute suitable entertainment for the five-and-under set. I understand that sometimes the sitter cancels at the last minute; I understand that sometimes Mommy wants to have a night out. Fine. But when a baby decides to exercise its lungs during the Christmas Eve carol service and his parents put on grimly apologetic smiles instead of taking the baby outside until he calms down, or when parents bring kindergarten-age children to a French bistro and let them crawl around under the tables and bang their glasses with forks and whine, “I said I want a HAM-buh-GERRRRR,” I have a little problem with that.

My parents would have put up with that crap for all of four and a half seconds before sealing our lips with epoxy resin and escorting us outside for a refresher course on acceptable behavior, and my brother and I knew it. We still acted up sometimes, of course, but my parents had set limits and for the most part we observed them, because we knew what we could expect if we didn’t. A lot of parents seem to believe that children have the right to whine and fuss and misbehave, that they just don’t know any better. Excuse me, but why don’t they? Don’t these parents discipline their children? Nobody expects a two-year-old to toe the line, obviously, but by the age of five kids should know that their actions – especially actions that fray the nerves of other adults – have consequences. Not to sound too much like Miss Minchin, but parents have a right to expect – not to mention a duty to enforce – a certain standard of behavior in return for feeding their children, and clothing them, and buying them toys and looking after their educations and of course giving them love and support. Children do not come pre-programmed; they need parents for a reason, and not just because they cannot hunt their own food. Again, everyone knows that forbidding a toddler to watch Teletubbies for a week won’t accomplish anything, but older kids need discipline.

I don’t mean yelling at the kids, or throwing them an absent-minded slap (or worse – I don’t like kids but I obviously wouldn’t advocate hitting them. It doesn’t work anyway). I don’t mean ignoring them, and I don’t mean threatening them with the monster under the bed. And with all due respect to kinder, gentler ë90s parenting, “time-outs” might calm a fractious three-year-old, but once a kid has reached school age, making him sit in a chair quietly for five minutes won’t get it done. I’ve seen the evidence for myself; children don’t respect time-outs. Cut off their television privileges for a week; confine them to their rooms; assign them extra chores. These things work because kids hate them and will behave themselves in order to avoid incurring the penalty again. Eventually, kids learn WHY they shouldn’t whine or lie or run with scissors or write on the wall with magic marker, but until they get the hang of childhood morality’s finer points, parents need to use other deterrents.

Readers who have kids have probably begun composing an indignant e-mail right about now, telling me I don’t know anything about raising a child and lambasting me for passing judgment on them. Well, I’ve already admitted that I don’t have kids, but my own childhood didn’t end very long ago, and I can tell you from my own experience as a kid that effective parenting requires a sort of Machiavellian approach – in other words, I loved my parents but I feared them also. To put it another way, most kids can make their own friends; they don’t need to stay friends with their parents. Parents need to practice saying the word “no,” and backing it up.

In the end, I don’t give a damn how people deal with uprisings at home, but they had better have a strategy for controlling the rugrats when the family ventures out in public. I cannot abide the indulgent, yet self-righteous, parents who smile tolerantly at the window-rattling squawkings of their offspring, then try to stare me down when I light a cigarette – as though their little brats had not confirmed the health of their lungs a hundred times over already. If my smoke bothers you or your child, feel free to ask me – politely – to extinguish the cigarette, but please don’t act as though I invited your daughter to join my child pornography ring. I also cannot stand the parents who stand around chit-chatting while their kids run amok, then act offended when someone calls this fact to their attention. Children sometimes confuse “the grocery store” with “the playground,” particularly when left unattended, and much though I love following a zig-zag trail of zwieback crumbs through the aisles of my local market, I must ask that the children stay in the cart or somehow tethered to the parent in charge.

One more thing. When a woman becomes pregnant, she and/or her husband or partner have nearly nine months to learn and master the stroller and its accouterments. They have plenty of time to practice folding and unfolding it, carrying it up and down stairs, and so on. That way, when the baby arrives, they don’t have to stand at the top of a narrow subway stairwell and block foot traffic while struggling to close the bloody stroller. Nor do they have to pair up and lug the stroller along the sidewalk sideways. They can also select a model with plenty of storage space, so that they can leave the child IN the stroller instead of piling all of their packages in the seat and dragging the child along by the hand while said child yells its head off because its little legs have gotten tired.

I thank the parents of the world for their efforts on behalf of the continuation of the human race . . . but their job doesn’t stop at conception. I don’t claim to have any insights into controlling children, but then again, I don’t inflict my brats on an unsuspecting public, and while some parents do a fine job, others need to send away for a cattle prod and some reform school brochures pronto.

Oh, and about those indignant e-mails . . . send them to me in twenty years.

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