The rules parents don’t expect to make

I noticed an amusing article on the Marilyn Stowe recent blog.
Raising a child can be one of the most rewarding experiences of a person’s life, but it never comes without challenges. Parents must act as protectors, advocates and guides for the children while they are young – and many continue to do so even after their kids have become adults in their own right.
Rules are important in childhood. They help shape a child’s perspective and how they will interact with the wider world. Some are pretty universal, such as “be polite”.
However life is unpredictable. Sometimes parents end up creating household rules that they never could have imagined when their child first arrived. Parents on social media site Reddit discussed the quirky and unexpected rules they have found themselves enforcing.
These included “No dark arts in the house”. This particularly odd rule was drawn up after the parent’s children were playing Harry Potter, or “running around waving wands at each other”, and a loud argument ensued after one child put a curse on the other. While this response may sound sensible, one commenter jokingly added that “kids need to explore the dark arts as a means of coming to terms with the existence of evil”.
Another user had to institute a “No haunting the neighbours” rule after their daughter was caught whispering things like “You have dishonored your ancestors” into the vents of their apartment building. Apparently one of their elderly neighbours actually thought he could hear a ghost.
However most were a little less supernatural in nature. One parent has had to implement a “No headbutting at the dinner table” rule for one of their children. The siblings were seven and three years old and while the oldest was described as “so gentle and timid” the youngest was “an absolute psycho with zero fear”. You can probably guess which one the rule was created for.
Another rule came from a parent whose family all support different teams: “If your sports team loses and you are upset, go to your room until you calm down”. Others offered in the conversation included “Don’t write on your siblings”, “No cats in the laundry shoot” (even if “they like it”), “No banana fights” and “No crayons in the butter”.
One of the more bizarre ones, however, was “No machetes on the trampoline”. It would be quite easy to dismiss this one as a joke but, considering some of the others, there’s a chance a household somewhere in the world has this rule in place.