Published: October 28, 2009 12:34 am      

GESENHUES: Tales from a tattler

My daughter is a tattletale. We knew this going into kindergarten, but were unaware of her full capacity to tattle. Like her mom, if she enjoys something, she doesn’t do it halfway; she’s a really, really good tattletale.

It has become our Monday morning breakfast topic and our afterschool check-in discussion.

We start the week with pancakes and the routine question, “What are you not going to do this week?”

My daughter looks down at her breakfast and heaves a heavy sigh, “I’m not going to tattle.”

“No matter what, right?”

“No matter what, I won’t tattle. Unless somebody’s bleeding, right mom? If someone’s bleeding I have to tell the teacher.”

“Yes, if someone is badly hurt, you should tell the teacher,” I say.

“What if their feelings are badly hurt?” she asks, looking for a loophole.

“If someone else’s feelings are hurt then it is their job to tell the teacher, not yours.” My daughter’s tattletale-ing is far reaching. She doesn’t just tell on kids who have wronged her. She is on the look-out for slighted kiddos across the playground. She’s the superhero of whistle-blowing.

“Fine,” she says. She’s never happy with this conclusion. We’ve taken away her superpower.

Regardless of how well this conversation goes, it never sticks. By Wednesday, the ride home from afterschool care includes a story of how someone cut in line and why she had to tell because everybody knows that you can’t cut in line and get away with it. I try to explain that cutting in line could be considered just as offensive as tattling. She doesn’t buy it.

My daughter sees her tattling as an endeavor in righteousness. Part of the issue is that she has the mentality of an only child. Her brother didn’t show up until a couple months before her fifth birthday. According to Alfred Adler, the famed psychologist who sold us on birth order psychology, there’s a good chance she will exhibit only-child personality traits throughout her life. If things go per his theory, she will be conscientious and ambitious as well as conservative and conforming.

The conservative in her has already bared its Republican head. Last year during elections, my daughter refused to side with me and her dad to pull for Obama. She was a McCain fan from the get-go.

“I like his girl,” my daughter would say about Sarah Palin. If you’ve read anything I’ve written about politics you know how difficult of a pill this was for me to swallow. “But Sarah doesn’t want you to be educated or have a choice,” I would tell her, referencing Palin’s anti-abortion and no sex education in school platform. My debate held no water with my daughter; she was a tried and blue conservative. Her political views were my first real test in parenting. I want my children to be their own person; but, this is much easier said than done when being their own person means their vote would negate your vote for president.

We found our way through her conservative tendencies and embraced her love for McCain-Palin (even though we checked Obama on our ballot). It’s the conforming issues that are proving to be a more difficult battle for her dad and me. Not so much her conforming, but her need to make everyone else around her conform to her rules.

How do you curb your cute-as-a-button snitch? Or do you?

What if we encourage it?

Nobody likes a tattletale; but, we all need them. What would we do without whistleblowers to stop big business from exploiting customers or investigative journalists who keep tabs on crooked politicians? Jeffrey Wigand may not have any more tobacco industry buddies, but now we are all a lot more aware of how far a billion-dollar corporation will go to turn a profit.

And how much of the tattling has to do with birth order versus parental order? I mean, who’s the bigger tattletale here anyway? The five year old daughter tattling on a line-cutter or the 36-year-old mom tattling on her daughter? From the way it’s reading, this tattle-teller doesn’t fall far from the apple tree.