So Your Precious Snowflake Doesn’t Hurt His Teeth…
…on those hard, hard, crusts.
Is your child not spoiled enough? Does he accept that some parts of the world will not immediately conform themselves to his whims? Does he fail to disdain “normal” bread? If so, you are seriously failing as a parent. If your child does not reach alleged adulthood without an ego the size of a skyscraper in Dubai and without the innate, inherent, belief that the universe exists for his pleasure alone, you run the risk of producing a mature, responsible adult — and what would become of America then?
Which brings me, roundabout, to the Crust Cutter. In Ye Olden Tymes, it was considered an acceptable act of motherly indulgence to cut the crusts off sandwiches with an ordinary kitchen knife. While this might have been a sign of tenderness and perhaps a touch over-coddling, it was still relatively mundane. The flaw, you see, was that this left the sandwich functional but not fun, and anything which is not fun — from learning multiplication tables to eating — is damaging to your child’s developing perception of the world as someplace whose main function is to amuse him. An unamused child is a child who may be forced to confront the concept he is not the sole reason for all of existence, and that will damage his self esteem and condemn him to a life of despair and misery. Thus, we must make food amusing as well as tasty and theoretically nutritious. If you fail to cut your child’s sandwiches into heart-shaped…er…shapes, you show that you do not love your child. If you do not make “dino bytes” from his food, you will stunt his interest in the wonderful world of science. And so on. I am not sure of the harm done by not making bear shaped sandwiches, but I’m sure it’s traumatic.
