Not in your house. Outdoors, I don’t care if you live in Juneau, Alaska, and it’s January. You want to hold it outdoors, and you want the fire department to stand by to hose the area down immediately after you put the ice cream in front of them. And you want all the adults inside the house where they can drink in relative safety.

Forget it. These toys are creatures of the multi-billion-dollar Cuteness Industry, which is extremely powerful and has influence everywhere. The Voyager II space probe found traces of a Snoopy toothbrush on Mars. If you fail to buy Smurfs, agents of the Smurf Corporation will mail them to you, or smuggle them into your house baked inside loaves of bread, until you reach the national average of 24 Smurfs per child under eight.

So you have to live with them. The only defense you have is to encourage your child to play hostile games with them, such as “Smurf War Tribunal” and “Mr. Smurf Visits the Toaster Oven.”

Starting at around age two, your child will start asking you a great many questions. This can be annoying, but you must remember that if children couldn’t ask questions, they would have no way to irritate you when they’re strapped in the car seat.

The most popular question for small children is “Why?” They can use it anywhere, and it’s usually impossible to answer:

CHILD: What’s that?

YOU: That’s a goat.

CHILD: Why?

Our son would lie awake at night thinking of questions that nobody could answer:

ROBERT: Which is bigger, five or six?

ME (confidently): Six.

ROBERT: What if it’s a great big five made out of stone?

ME: Um.

ROBERT: And a little six made out of wood.

Once I hauled out my guitar to sing traditional folk songs to Robert. It was going to be togetherness. It was going to be meaningful. It was going to be just like on “The Waltons.” Here is a verbatim transcript:

ME (singing): “Puff, the Magic Dragon, lived by the sea ...”

ROBERT: What’s a dragon?

ME: It’s a great big animal that has fire coming out of its nose. (Singing)

“Little Jackie Paper, loved that rascal ...”

ROBERT: Did Jackie Paper have fire coming out of his nose?

ME: No, he was a little boy, like you. Do you have fire coming out of your nose?

ROBERT (thoughtfully): No. Boogies.

ME: Um. Right. (Singing) “Little Jackie Paper, loved that ...”

ROBERT: Did Jackie Paper have boogies coming out of his nose?

The point here is that your child will never ask you where babies come from, or why the sky is blue, or any other question that has a real answer. Your child is going to want to know whether Jackie Paper had boogies coming out of his nose, and whether you answer “yes” or “no,” your child will want to know why.

Near the end of the second year, most parents start thinking about putting their child in a preschool program, which is a place that has all these little tables and chairs where your child makes these pathetic drawings that you put on your refrigerator. Also they eat snacks and take naps. That’s the core of the curriculum.

You must choose your child’s preschool program carefully, because it determines how well the child does in kindergarten, which affects how well the child does in grade school, which is an important factor in how well the child does in junior high school, which forms the basis for how well the child does in high school, which of course determines which college the child gets into.

On the other hand, all the child will do in college is listen to loud music and get ready for dates, so you don’t have to be all that careful about choosing the preschool program. Just kick the little chairs a few times to make sure they’re sturdy, and say a few words to the staff to let them know you’re a Concerned Parent (“Anything happens to my kid, I come in here and break some thumbs. Got it?”).

Also, make sure the preschool doesn’t have any guinea pigs. I don’t know why, but somewhere along the line, preschool educators picked up the insane notion that guinea pigs are educational, when in fact all they do is poop these little pellets that look exactly like the pellets you give them to eat. You don’t want your child exposed to that.

It’s good to encourage your child to participate in making up stories. Here’s a bedtime story I used to tell Robert, with his help:

ME: Once upon a time, there was a little boy named John.

ROBERT: No. Lee.

ME: Okay. There was a little boy named Lee, and one day he was walking along, and he ...

ROBERT: No. He was driving.

ME: Okay, he was driving along, and he saw ...

ROBERT: In a Jeep.

ME: He was driving along in a Jeep, and he saw a little toad.

ROBERT: No. He saw a dump truck.

ME: And they all lived happily ever after. Now go to sleep.

ROBERT: Why?

Well! So here we are! We’ve taken your baby from a little gourd-like object with virtually no marketable skills to a real little human being, capable of putting the cat in the dryer and turning it on all by himself or herself.

Sure, it’s been a lot of work for you. Sure, you would have liked to have had a few more quiet evenings alone, just the two of you sipping wine and talking instead of sitting in the hospital X-ray department, waiting to find out whether your child had, in fact, swallowed the bullets that it snatched out of the belt of the policeman who was writing a traffic ticket because you smashed into the furniture store when your child threw your glasses out the car window. But take a minute to look at the positive side of parenthood.

(Pause)

Give it time. You’ll come up with something. And when you do, think about how much fun it would be to do the whole thing over again. Not with the same child, of course; there is no way you could get it back into the uterus. I’m talking about a completely new baby, only this time around you’ll have a chance to avoid the mistakes you made last time, such as labor. I understand from reading the publications sold at supermarket checkout counters that you can now have a baby in a test tube! I don’t know the details, but it sounds much less painful than the usual route, although you’d have to balance that against the fact that the baby would be extremely small and cylindrical. It would look like those little Fisher-Price people.

But whether you have another child or not, the important thing is that you’ve experienced the fulfillment that comes with being a parent. You may feel your efforts will never be rewarded, but believe me, you have sown the seeds of love and trust, and I guarantee you that there will come a time, years from now, when your child—now an adult with children of his or her own—will come to you, and, in a voice quaking with emotion, ask for a loan for a down payment on a house much nicer than yours.