School is back in session, and with it, a recurring phenomenon. My oldest child turns into a pterodactyl when she gets home. She is typically a big sweetheart. She’s kind, listens well (usually), and even still enjoys our company. For some reason when she gets home from school, she regresses into a screeching monster, demanding food and terrorizing everyone around her. This regression is temporary but always present at the end of the school day, so it got me wondering, what’s going on at school to cause such a transformation?
Nothing, nothing happens at school.
Or at least this is what I’m often told. Currently her favorite things to update me on are how lunch tasted or “Look at what I made!” Her art is always beautiful, but it is also abundant. That got me thinking that maybe...just maybe, they’re running a children’s art sweat shop at her school.
It makes so much sense now! The massive amount of art that those kids generate isn’t just for the fridge. They run a closed-loop cartel: they use free child labor to manufacture the product, and then guilt-trip the parents into buying it back on overpriced mugs and tea towels. My kid is being exploited for her creative talent to rake in money for the PTA fund. That’s how they can afford all the nice events throughout the year: because of our kid’s hard labor, working in an art manufactory for 7 hours a day. “You want that waterslide at field day, kid? Get to painting!” And I thought there were child labor laws preventing this. Schools have found a way around such nonsense. But maybe it’s not just art that these kids are churning out; perhaps they’re having these kids do horticulture as well. Hmm.
Paging Dr. Green Thumb
I don’t know about anyone else, but we get hit hard every year, multiple times, to buy plants. Yes, plants. I think this is a pretty popular tactic across all schools to raise money for teachers so they may continue living their lavish lifestyles. The only problem I see here is that I’ve never seen, nor could I find, a physical location for where these plants are grown. Weird.
I’ve looked these places up, and they are miles away! Which makes me think that these “businesses” are just a digital front. There’s no possible way that they’re transporting that many plants to the school from such a great distance. Those kids are clandestinely growing those plants in an underground lair beneath the school.
Think about it; this makes the most sense. The school can use free child labor to grow plants throughout the year in their underground factory of verdant doom and pass it off as “fundraising”. I would even guess that there are more insidious things grown in that dank terrarium of child exploitation. She hasn’t been learning state capitals; she’s been working a 7-hour shift in an underground sweatshop, hoeing out mumkins and drying magic mushrooms under UV lamps. No wonder she’s dysregulated. Her lower back is probably killing her.
“Green” Energy
Another one of my working theories is that the school is stealing our life essence via our children. I’ve stated before that children are tiny vampires because all they do is steal your energy, time, and money. Where do you think they learned how to do this? Not from us, that’s for sure! It’s school; that’s where. Picture this. Your sweet, darling children are sent home from school as empty vessels. While at home, they begin the process of sapping all of your strength and energy, recharging like a battery. That’s how we can visibly see them improve when they’re home; they’re stealing all your metaphorical shit (lives)! That’s where this inverse relationship comes from; you pick them up after a day’s separation, and suddenly you feel that scale tipping back to your kid in terms of energy and happiness.
Your children are being drained of all of this stored energy at school. When fully extracted by the end of the day, they come home hungry, ready to feed again. This seesaw of disaster continues back and forth through the entire school year until you have full control again in the summer and can slowly recover some of your lost vigor. My real curiosity is finding out what they’re doing with all of that stolen vitality. Are they storing it in vats in the teacher’s lounge for a midday bump? Or maybe they’re selling it directly back to AEP to fuel all these new data centers popping up. What better, infinitely renewable energy source to power the AI revolution than the stolen life force of a second grader?
I’ve discovered the only known antidote to a case of the dinoroars: carbs and toons. You would think, after being locked in a classroom all day, she’d want to run free in the yard. No. She wants to sit motionless on the couch, staring blankly at a screen while systematically dismantling a bag of Goldfish. It’s like watching a smartphone recharge, just with way more crumbs.
Reality sets in
It could just be that making children concentrate and interact with each other is just that taxing. It takes a lot of energy to physically grow, let alone mentally grow, but doing both at the same time is exhausting. These poor kids are probably also holding in all of those weird urges that we often tell them to repress while in the presence of others. Adults still do this, and it’s tiring for us, so I can’t imagine the load that this puts on a child. This perfectly explains when your kids just start yelling at you without cause or start speaking in gibberish. They just have to get all of that repressed weirdness out. I often find myself doing the same thing after a long day but at least have the wherewithal to do it in private. As my father once famously told me in my youth, “We know you’re alright, but other people may wonder.”
Regardless of the reason, I’ve found that taking their grievance with as much understanding as I can muster will usually start to resolve the situation. I know, I’m making my kids out to be terrors, but in reality they’re great kids with sometimes big emotions. Maybe we should be taking a page out of their book, instead of steering them towards a calmer path. All of these feelings have to go somewhere, and bottling them up just worsens it. People have to get that crud out, and if we can’t teach them to fully recognize those emotions and move on, they’ll be just like us. Internalizing everything and being none the better for it. So, maybe let your kids fly those flags of unrepressed emotions and weirdness, and perhaps the world will eventually become a better place.
Dad out.