Don't Die on That Hill

One of the pieces of advice that parenting experts always dispense is to "pick your battles" with your children. It is interesting to note that this guidance has also been given to the architects of American foreign policy. However, in parenting and foreign policy this help is mostly theoretical, because more often than not, the other party will pick the battles for you. My children have had meltdowns over things that I couldn't even imagine being issues. For example, the Baby recently insisted that the brownie she ate after dinner didn't qualify as dessert, and that she should be able to have ice cream. She was very convincing in her screaming explanation that she was not asking for two desserts, the brownie just was not a dessert. Really, it was an issue of semantics, according to her. I held my ground, and decided that allowing her even a smidgen of ice cream would be interpreted as a tacit concession that maybe brownies aren't dessert. Then it's just a slippery slope to eating pudding for breakfast.

Sometimes, though it isn't so easy to decide when to let things go and when to make an issue of something. Over the last nine years, I have identified several areas that you should just let your kids win. It's just not worth the aggravation and you can save your energy for bigger battles like brushing teeth or hitchhiking across country.

1. Clothes (the early years)- When kids are little, some will happily go along with whatever a parent chooses for them to wear. Others will have quirky requirements for their attire, i.e., no stripes ("what am I, a zebra?"), only orange shirts, no dresses, only dresses, no shirt collars, or only short sleeves. But, when it comes down to it, what is important is that they don't freeze to death in the winter or overheat in the summer. Any outfits that meet those criteria are pretty much acceptable. If you are type-A, like me, this will drive you slightly insane because there is a closet and dresser full of cute, appropriate clothing being ignored while your kid traipses around in a bag-lady clown suit, but it is simply not worth the fight. That is why this happened:

And this: