I call this Pavlov parenting

Now that I’m a father, I’ve come to realize I have two “No”s. I have a “hard” no and a “soft” no. My son’s now only a year-and-a-half, so I find myself saying “no” to him a lot, but most of the “no”s throughout any given day are “soft” nos: “No, you can’t have a cookie” or “No, we can’t go outside right now” or “No, you can’t type on the keyboard.” The “hard” nos are reserved for those moments of imminent harm, like when you lose sight of your kid and find him at the top of the stairs (when only one second ago they were right by your side.)

You can recognize the hard nos from the soft nos by my son’s reaction. The soft nos result in his laughter or whines. Hard nos result in a jolt and sometimes (though rare) crying. I also have an offshoot of the hard no called “Absolutely not.” This one’s reserved for when you see your son running across the living room with a hundred dollar vase stretched out before him in his hands, laughing and giggling and having a ball.

I was thinking about my hard nos and soft nos and absolutely nots the other day and realized these are being ingrained into my son on such a deep level that even when he’s thirty, he’ll still probably respond the same, if I use one of them on him as an adult.

In other words, it’s Pavlov’s Dog parenting.

Just this instance happened to me recently.

When I was a kid and my father wanted me home from playing outside, instead of picking up his phone and calling/texting me (cellphones were about a billion years away then), he’d lean his head out the side door of our kitchen and whistle. This whistle had a very particular lilt that went something like ree-uh-reet, and it was loud. Very loud. In terms of earsplitting loudness, you have nails on a chalkboard, a train whistle, and then my father’s whistle. It could easily be heard for miles. And no matter where I was in the neighborhood, if I heard that whistle, I had five minutes to get in the door. If my foot wasn’t through that door in five minutes, well, as they say my a$$ was grass.

As a kid, I was so trained that when I heard this whistle, I would literally drop what I was doing and run with no explanation given to my friends because their parents had their own version a home-now-or-else call. The one time I did ignore it, did not end well for me.

My father stopped using this whistle to call me in when I was about sixteen and got my driver’s license and starting venturing farther from home than even my father’s whistle could reach, and somewhere along the way, the whistle was retired completely.

But that’s all part of growing up and a long time in the past…or not so long ago, as I recently learned:

A couple weeks ago, I was out gardening and I heard my father’s whistle. It wasn’t his, of course, but there’s someone in my neighborhood that has the exact same whistle and uses it for the exact same purpose as my dad used to. And I swear, when I heard that ree-uh-reet, I actually dropped my shovel in the dirt, got up, and made about three steps in the direction of the whistle before I realized what I was doing.

So if any of you ever want me to come home for dinner, just lean your head out your door, whistle, and I’ll be there in five minutes.

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