[The following is excerpted from TOUGH TALK TO TODDLERS: Make Your Child a Winner Before Second Grade by Bud “Spike” Drucker (Rando House; 244 pp.; $23.95).]
All right, let’s do this.
My name is Bud “Spike” Drucker. I’ve been a Marine drill instructor, a semi-pro football coach, a personal trainer, and the chief spokesperson for my own line of muscle and weight supplements, including PACK IT IN AND PACK IT ON!, BEEF OUT AND BEEF UP!, and BEEF OUT AND BEEF UP FOR LADIES! I’ve got a B.A. from a for-profit institution of higher learning. I hold a U.S. passport in my own name. I am a member of the National Geographic Society. I own my own home. I drive a beautiful late-model car and have a beautiful former-model wife. I weigh 220 and can bench 250. My wife can bench 175 — which is considerably more than she weighs!
Sure, it’s a lot. It’s my life and I’m damn proud of it. But none of that is important. What’s important is your child.
And I don’t mean your seven-and-up-year-old, because by then it’s too late. Too late for what you ask? My answer: For everything.
It’s too late to get him ready for the Bad World™ he’s going to have to live in. Too late for her to arm and gird and bulk up and equip herself for success in childhood. By age seven it’s too late for all kids to acquire the kind of ruthless discipline and rigorous self-command it will take to develop into a Toddler Triumphant™ and, from there, into a Pre-School Prevailer™.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my years of shouting at Marines, barking at football players, urging on body-builders, and sweet-talking muscle-supplement takers, it is this: All of them wish they had started younger. “I began training and sculpting my body into a rock-hard slab of impervious muscle in the Fourth Grade,” one man told me. “And I wish to God I had started in Second.”
“Oh yeah?” another man retorted. “Well, I started the Yakuza-Ninja Twelve-Sacred-Steps-to-Physical-Perfection regimen in kindergarten, and even then I was playing catch-up. Ask me about the time Declan Keebler kicked my ass in the back of the room during Nap. On second thought, don’t ask!”
I feel for these men. And I feel for you, the parent or caregiver. Plus I feel for myself and my former-model wife, for having to live in what we have now on the scene today, a Society of Sissies™ rotting out from the core. You name it, it’s killing us: Parental Helicopterism. The feminizing influence. Participation trophies. Political correctness. Trigger warnings. Micro-aggressions. Everybody always having to be “nice.”
But never mind what I feel. That’s not important. What’s important is what I feel for your child.
If he — and let’s get this straight from the jump: when I say “he” I’ll mean “he or she,” and when I say “she” I’ll mean “he or she” — is ages zero to five, he just doesn’t know how to train himself to confront the brutal, all-against-all cutthroat competition and screaming, anarchic fistfight that is first grade. She needs a teacher. She needs a mentor. She needs a trainer.
And that’s you.
But it isn’t you. Because you can’t do it.
Sure, you “love” your child. But so what? You’re as much a product of our degenerated society as anyone else. And so I’m sure you teach your kids what my parents taught me: “Share your toys.” “Don’t cry or I’ll give you something to cry about.” “Be fair or shut up.” “Use your goddamn words.” “Wait your turn or I’ll get the strap.” “Stop beating up your sister.” “Leave the dog alone.” “Don’t give in to your natural curiosity and examine any guns that someone has left lying around.”
It makes me sick. All of it. And I have a feeling that it makes you sick, too.
That’s why you’re reading this book.
Something or someone has prompted you to pick up and peruse this tome. Maybe it was a still, small, nagging voice in your head, like the ones in mine. Or a friend. Or a colleague. Or a concerned stranger you met in the supermarket, who generously informed you that you were a lousy parent. Whatever it was, now you’re like me. We’re both sick — sick of having to cripple our children with the ego-crushing pressure and will-sapping stress of being concerned about the feelings of others.
So let’s be sick together.
In the following pages I’m going to show you what you’re doing wrong, what your child is doing wrong, and how to correct it all. I’ll share helpful tips and important insights I’ve acquired from a lifetime of telling grown men what to do. I’ll give you effective action-steps you can take to bring your child up to speed physically, emotionally, mentally — and, yes, spiritually, because nothing means anything if it doesn’t get us right with the Big Man Upstairs. We’ll shed a tear, sigh a sigh, and maybe even share a laugh or two.
It won’t be easy. But, as I say in my self-published Marine memoir entitled Wisdom Gleaned From a Season of Yelling at Maggots, “No man failed but to find his True Nature that did not leave his comfort zone for the seasick wisdom of choppy waters first.” So come with me on a journey to a voyage of discovery.
Pasco County Schools
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