If you insist on doing a timeout out with zombies around, remember these dos and don’ts:
Do explain to your children what they did wrong. If you’re going to imperil their lives with a timeout, they at least deserve to know why.
Don’t tolerate any whining about the punishment. Complaining is almost as loud as a temper tantrum and will attract zombies just as fast.
Do act like you know what you’re doing. Even if you immediately realize it was dumb to do a timeout deep in zombie country, pretend it was part of your plan all along. As a parent, this is a skill you’ve already mastered.
Don’t be afraid to bail on the timeout if the zombie horde gets too big to fight off. Take your children with you when you run. It’s bad form to let them get eaten on purpose.
Do resume the interrupted timeout as soon as you get home. If you commute the sentence, your children will think they can get away with anything if they almost die. In the zombie apocalypse, that excuse will get old fast.
Don’t forget to use a watch. Time can seem to slow down or speed up depending on whether you’re watching a pot boil or killing hordes of zombies with your family members’ lives on the line. Use a timer to eliminate subjectivity. Your kids have to understand five minutes means five minutes, no matter what.
Do threaten to do a timeout in dangerous areas again. Even if you realized it was suicidal the first time, the threat alone may be enough to deter future bad behavior. Pray your kids don’t call your bluff.
Don’t tell your spouse what happened. There’s no reason to turn a near escape into a relationship-ending fight. What your partner doesn’t know could save your marriage.
HIT IT
Time to smack around a controversial topic: spanking. In a book about violently smashing zombie skulls in the presence of children, this section will still generate the most irate emails—at least until the internet goes out. I’m looking forward to the end of the world more than most.
There was a time everyone spanked their kids. Now, experts recommend against it. I’m guessing on that. I’ve never read a parenting book in my life, which is obvious if you’ve skimmed even a few pages of this guide. But in general, experts rarely recommend that you hit anything. Good luck getting by a doctoral board with the thesis “Violence is the answer.”
Regardless of your feelings on spanking before the apocalypse, at the end of the world, corporal punishment should only be used as a last resort. Noise attracts zombies, and even a symbolic spanking with little force behind it will make your child cry ten times louder. This method should only be used to get your kids moving in moments of immediate peril. If a child throwing a tantrum is small enough, pick them up and carry them with you. Only use spankings if they grab onto something to hold themselves in place. That sounds farfetched to childless people, but it’s a daily occurrence for parents. I’ve had kids grab their bed railings with their hands AND feet when I tried to get them up in the morning. I’m lucky humans no longer have prehensile tails.
PRIVILEGES REVOKED
There are worse things than pain. If you don’t believe me, take away a teenager’s phone. Or my phone for that matter. A five-minute stint in a corner might not frighten children, but a day without apps certainly will. It’s a death sentence. Threaten to take away your children’s electronic devices and you’ll soon find you have a house full of well-behaved kids, at least until you look away.
The only problem with this approach is there won’t be much left for you to revoke after the world ends. The zombies will destroy everything that makes life worth living. Even if you somehow manage to charge them, phones and tablets will be useless without the internet. I recommend holding a backyard burial for all your gadgets. It’ll give your kids a sense of closure and let the grieving process begin.
To keep your punishments relevant, get creative. For teenagers, take away naps. There’s nothing worse than making them stay conscious in a world they already hate. They’ll have to be around their family members, who are usually their least favorite people in the world. They may also be the only people left in the world, which makes it even worse. This penalty is so devious it should be banned as cruel and unusual punishment. Too bad the Constitution will be as meaningless as those “Employees Must Wash Hands” signs. Hurray for anarchy.
The best part about nap deprivation is it’s easy to enforce. Any time your teenagers fall asleep, interrupt them. Your children have been doing this to you for your entire life. It’s payback time. Just don’t use this punishment on younger kids. If your children are under the age of thirteen, let them rest as much as they want. That’ll be the only “me time” you get in the apocalypse. Just don’t spend it digging through your secret stash of junk food. Kids in a dead sleep can still hear you open a bag of chips up to four miles away.
Another effective punishment is to ban your kids from seeing their friends. This is a safe move because it means your kids will be inside your own house rather than wandering the neighborhood, risking death to improve their social lives. In all likelihood, their friends will already be undead monsters anyway. Not that this really matters. As zombies, they’ll be ravenously hungry, won’t think for themselves, and will have no regard for others. In other words, they’ll be indistinguishable from ordinary teenagers.
The main problem with using this punishment on your kids is if their behavior improves, you’ll have to let them see their friends. Going out and looking for people who may or may not still be alive is a suicide mission. Whether or not you let your kids do it will come down to how sick of them you are.
Taking away something kids already have works better than promising them something extra in the future. If you offer rewards, you’ll have to constantly think of bigger and better things to keep your kids motivated. Eventually, you’ll be handing out expensive watches and luxury sedans when your kids do the dishes. Most of that stuff will be free through looting, but getting it will be a lot of work and storage space might become an issue. If you just take away something your kids already have, you can give it back when they stop acting up. Plus you can do that an infinite number of times without taking up any more garage bays.
EXTRA CHORES
If you want to kill two birds with one stone, punish your kids with chores. Of course, literally killing two birds with one stone would be even better because then your family could eat. If your kids do ever get a double bird kill with a single rock, give them a full pardon for whatever they did. Food trumps everything. Plus that would mean they’ve got one heck of an arm. You don’t want them to hate you if the apocalypse ends and they become rich professional athletes.
There will be more than enough work to go around after the end of the world, so using chores for a punishment seems like a no-brainer. Once the running water stops, you’ll have to go somewhere with buckets to fetch it. There will be laundry to wash by hand, supplies to gather, food to cook, and a house to clean—if only the second floor, as I explained in the home defense chapter. You’ll be amazed how dirty a place gets when an entire family is home all day to mess it up. Keeping even part of it clean might not be possible. At some point, it may be better to burn it down and move.
Feel free to dump as many of these chores on your kids as you can. The worse your kids are, the less you’ll have to do. There will finally be an upside to having terrible children.
Top Chores to Use as Punishment
Chore
Pro
Con
Carrying Water
Your kids will stay hydrated.
The water will come back soaked in their clothes, not in the buckets.
Cooking Dinner
For once, you can complain about someone else’s cooking.
It’s dangerous to put a person who’s mad at you in charge of your food.
Doing Laundry
You can make someone else drag all your laundry to the river and stand in it for hours.
Your kids might get swept away or, worse, have fun in the water.
<
br /> Doing the Dishes
Kids are a convenient replacement for the dishwasher.
You might not have enough food to get the dishes dirty.
Going on Supply Runs
Your kids will find new stuff to bring home.
They’ll lose it all on the way back. The apocalypse won’t have a lost and found.
Inventory the Supplies
It’ll keep the pantry organized.
It’ll keep your pantry mysteriously empty.
Cleaning the House
It’s their mess anyway.
They’ll make the house dirty at roughly the same rate they clean, so the best you can hope for is that they break even.
Gathering Firewood
It’ll help heat your home.
It’ll help your kids burn stuff.
Cleaning the Windows
The glass will sparkle like never before.
No one will notice since you’ll have blankets over it.
Like timeouts, chores are a delayed punishment. If your kids act up when you’re out in the open surrounded by zombies, you can’t make them wash windows right then. You’ll have to wait until you get home. To be effective, the prospect of doing a chore in the future has to be so unpleasant that even the threat of it forces immediate obedience. That means chores that are even a little fun can’t be punishments. If your kids like to carry water buckets or cook food, don’t let them do either. Your job is to squeeze all the joy out of their lives. It shouldn’t be hard. You’re probably doing it already.
There are some chores that should never be used as a punishment, even if kids hate them. These include patrolling the perimeter, night guard duty, and scouting the surrounding area to check for zombie swarms and hostile groups of survivors. Kids doing anything as a punishment will do a bad job. It’s not a huge issue if they only clean half the laundry or retrieve half the needed amount of water, but if they only patrol half the perimeter, everyone might wake up as zombies. Never put your kids in charge of anything your life depends on. That’s a good rule to live by even in the pre-zombie world.
Along the same lines, don’t punish your kids with any chores that put something sharp or deadly in their hands. Kids are unfocused even when they’re perfectly serene. Add in anger and disobedience, and their attention to detail will dip. Only send your children to chop wood as a punishment if you’re fine with them coming home with fewer limbs than they started with. If your child has a limb surplus, that might work out, but if your kid has the standard number, leave chopping to the professionals.
The downside of using chores as a punishment is eventually you’ll become reliant on your children’s help. If you make chores a penalty for bad behavior and your kids stop misbehaving, you’ll have to do all that work yourself. It’s a system that encourages your kids to act better but incentivizes you to keep them bad. The only workaround to this problem is to punish your kids with made-up chores that don’t really need to be done. Figuring out what to make your kids do will be harder than doing all the chores yourself. So you can either create more work for yourself or you can let your kids get away with everything. There are no wins in parenting.
UNDER MY ROOF
Many children threaten to run away. Very few go through with it. Deep down, they know they have a sweet deal at home. There are only two people in the world who love them by default. Yes, sometimes kids end up with only one, and in some hard circumstances they have none. But for most children, there are two parents who would literally die for them. It isn’t merit-based. Kids don’t have to earn love like a spouse does. If kids slack off, their parents can’t divorce them. The closest equivalent is giving them up for adoption, but the age limit for that cuts off early. Not that I’ve looked into it or anything.
It’s crazy for a kid to give up their built-in servants, but some children still threaten to do it. They think they’ll get a better deal in a cold, uncaring world where no one will notice if they live or die. Most kids realize their mistake before they get to the front door, although a few make it down the street or to a neighbor’s house. The only thing worse than living at home is living somewhere else.
Under your roof, you make the rules. Kids try to find loopholes—whether those rules apply on lawns and in courtyards is a constant source of debate—but in general, the principle is universally accepted. So if you have older children who refuse to follow your rules, the ultimate disciplinary measure is to make them move out. Your teenagers or almost-adult children will undoubtedly think this is a good idea at first. So you have to make sure they’re self-sufficient enough to survive until they learn their lesson. If they walk out the door and get eaten by zombies right away, you’ll have accomplished nothing. Although as a parent, you should be used to that by now.
Also, make sure you’re prepared in the unlikely event your children thrive on their own and don’t come back. At that point, you’ve technically succeeded as a parent. Against all odds, you somehow managed to raise self-sufficient human beings. Of course, if you kicked them out during the zombie apocalypse, they’ll hate your guts forever. That’s okay. It shows they’re excellent judges of character.
LIFE LESSONS
No matter which punishment you choose, it’ll only be effective if your kids understand why they’re in trouble. After the offense and punishment have both run their course, sit your children down and explain to them why you did what you did. Your kids will listen intently and say they understand. Then they’ll act up again. If punishing kids actually worked, half the parents in America wouldn’t self-medicate with alcohol. But you have to stick with it. Maybe your children will learn to behave because you’re a stern disciplinarian. Or maybe they’ll grow up on their own. Either way, most kids get there eventually. And those that don’t go into politics.
Even if none of your attempts at discipline work, at least you tried. You can struggle through the zombie apocalypse knowing that for all the things that are wrong with your kids, your parenting wasn’t the problem. Their bad attitudes probably come down to genetics, and that’s only fifty percent your fault.
CHAPTER 11
SO YOU HAVE TO CUT OFF YOUR ARM
Sometimes the worst happens. Scratch that. Usually the worst happens. That’s the second rule of parenting. The first rule is if the kids are quiet, they’re up to something.
In a world full of ravenous undead monsters, the odds of being bitten by a zombie are high. Add a distracting kid to the mix, and the chances skyrocket. It’s hard to keep an eye out for reanimated corpses while also arguing with a four-year-old about whether or not her leggings are the right shade of pink. At least you’ll die over something important.
But if you are bitten by a zombie, don’t give up yet. You have one small chance of survival: amputation. Cut off the bitten area immediately before the infection spreads. Read this section in advance to save precious seconds. If you’ve already been bitten and you’re perusing it for the first time right now, it’s too late. Unless you’re a speed reader. I should probably stop using all these extra words to slow you down. Right after this sentence. Or maybe this one. Moan if you’re dead yet.
Once you’re bitten, you’ll have only moments to make several life-or-death decisions. That’s why it’s important to plan them out ahead of time. Sit down with your family and decide which limbs you can and can’t live without. Write down your decision, preferably on a crude, cartoonish drawing your kids can understand. They might be the only ones around to do the cutting. Make your instructions comprehensive and legible. You won’t be able to give any last-minute instructions. Your kids won’t hear you over the chainsaw.
This is the amputation chart I gave to my family:
SLICE AND DICE
Always keep a sharp cutting tool nearby. It’s best to have it somewhere on your person. If you set it down, you’ll never see it again. You have kids in the house, so things move on their own. It’s like living with poltergeists.
Having the right tool at hand the moment
you need it will make all the difference. It doesn’t matter if you were only bitten on your pinkie. You’ll still die if the sharpest cutting tool available is a spoon. Unless you’re tough enough to slowly scoop off your own hand. Remember me when you get your movie deal.
Whatever you use will be subpar by modern surgery standards. There won’t be many sanitized scalpels floating around once the dead walk the earth. Then again, you also won’t end up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. Insurance companies won’t survive the zombie apocalypse. The end of the world sounds kind of nice.
The Best Cutting Tools
Cutting Tool
Pro
Con
Butter Knife
Great if you want to butter a scone for your last meal.
You won’t live long enough to eat it.
Steak Knife
Sharp.
Hard to use effectively without a fork to hold your limb in place.
Karate Chop
If this works, you’re the most deadly ninja ever to live.
It won’t.
Wolverine’s Claws
You’re Wolverine in the X-Men.
Only Dead on the Inside Page 11
