Of the folly of bribery

As with most parents, I occasionally find myself bribing my child to finish her dinner.

"If you eat two more bites, you can have some ice cream for dessert." I repeated this in both official languages for clarity, but she still seemed unimpressed, continuing to play with the toy she'd brought to the table.

Since ice cream wasn't working, I tried something else. "You can have fruit if you finish this," I offered.

This time she perked up. She ate that offered forkful, and another, then pushed herself away from the table and went to the back room to await the promised fruit. I dished it out, the new canned fruit in a plastic screw-top jar instead of the old tins, congratulating myself all the while on raising a daughter who preferred fruit, even canned, to ice cream. For good measure, I got some for myself too, gleefully counting my meals that day and realizing that this bowl made for my sixth serving of fruits-and-veggies.

Just as I was rinsing my own bowl and opening the dishwasher to empty it, my congratulatory musings were crushed horribly under the weight of my 31-pound preschooler. She marched out to the kitchen, deposited bowl and spoon in the sink with a plastic clatter, and said, "Can I have my ice cream now?"

I told her it had been one or the other, fruit or ice cream, and she'd chosen fruit. She tried apologizing, because she knows saying sorry will sometimes result in getting something I've denied her. I just told her that she had nothing to be sorry for, but she didn't need two desserts and she'd already had one, so she still couldn't have ice cream. She sighed mightily and offered to help me empty the dishwasher, knowing that asking again was an exercise in futility.

The downside to this approach, of course, is that it means I'd be a hypocrite if I had the ice cream I'd been planning for myself.

I haven't figured out yet if I've won this round.