The Parent's Encyclopedia

From the moment your kids are born, your life has changed forever. For the first couple of years of projectile vomiting and crying, things are relatively straightforward: You are held hostage by an autocratic terrorist cell that shits itself continually and wakes you up in the dead of night with a brain-buggering siren-like wail and an eye-watering, warm aromatic cloud of gas. After that, things become unpleasant.

To navigate the perplexing aspects of parenthood, we present the ultimate dad's dictionary and mum's aide-mémoire rolled into one.

Attention Span Content Filter

This is the text stub at the head of an article that keeps your children away from consuming any content that you do not wish them to see. It consists mostly of adverbial clauses, with parenthesised (or comma) delineated sub-clauses, that are arranged into long, 52 word detailed sentences by the use of semi-exotic punctuation marks; includes a closing sub-clause that features a multisyllable word such as 'verisimilitude', 'heretofore', or a short discussion of the Oxford comma.

At around six seconds after your child has started to investigate the protected content, their drip-fed dopamine levels will crash and they will immediately seek a YouTube Short of a cat falling off a stool or a TikTok of a dog singing a Korean pop song.

Bathtime

A period of about half an hour in the early evening where the usual rules of hydrodynamics are suspended. In fluid dynamics, inserting an irregularly shaped object into a vessel of water will cause the water to be displaced by the volume of the object. In bathtime hydromechanics, this is no longer true, as the water displaced is equal to the volume of the child, minus half a pint of bath water sucked from their sponge, plus the two or three litres you will wring from your clothes and hair after the experiment has concluded.

Bedtime

Here's a word to strike terror into every parent's heart: Bedtime. Bedtime is where the sweet, adorable, only occasionally malodorous kids in your life turn into junior ASBOIDS, running rings around you. Apples of your eye, formerly known as 'your children' bounce off walls like unstable electrons in a reactor core. Bedtime means the mum/dad bomb is already armed, and you are primed to go ka-boom into next week.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle

A branch of this key tenet of quantum mechanics - the observer effect - states that the very act of observing something actually changes it in some way. With regard to your offspring, this works in the following way. Your child is in the cot but you have forgotten to put on the baby monitor. After a period of sleep that is five minutes longer than their usual nap, you become flaky and paranoid and investigate. What you find is that your child was asleep, but the act of opening the nursery door has caused three photons of light to fall on their face and they are now fully awake and wailing like a banshee. The act of observing your child has changed it from a rested, contented child to a whirlwind of flailing arms and sonic mayhem. Science isn't always fun.

Hoodie

An item of youth clothing that signifies the presence of your teenage son. The purpose of the hood is two-fold. First, it deflects all reasonable attempts by authority figures to establish eye contact. The second, more important, function is for your teenage son to propagate a black-hole based universe where only death metal can escape the event horizon formed by the boundary of the hooded top.

Infant determination

Your child's Joker, infant determination is their dogged pursuit of a goal no matter what the horrifying consequences may turn out to be.

K-Pop

Plastic, holographic, chocolate tunes, as sung by Idoru-like, fresh-faced girl-groups whose vocal range extends six octaves above the sound of fresh lettuce liquefied in a countertop juicer. Like holographic lettuce juice, K-Pop projections are insubstantial, empty and aromatic, yet foul-tasting.

Teenage Daughter

As a father, you will be astonished to learn that this is when your daughter starts to take an active interest in other people's teenage sons or daughters. It is, therefore, the closest any man will get to wanting to own a firearm of some kind or, failing that, a pitchfork.

Teenage girls often orbit shopping centres, bus stops and anywhere young men with pathetically under-powered motorcycles gather. They are frequently found in small clans protected by a noxious cloud of synthesized pink gases and scowling bitchiness.

Teenage Son

In order to fully understand your teenage son, it is vital that you realise that his very raison d'être is to be misunderstood. A force of elemental awkwardness, his recalcitrance places him on the stubborn scale somewhere between a railway industry union official and a camel that has been cemented into the ground.

Teenage sons fall into two camps, 'the chip off the old block' and 'the rebel without a pause'. While the rebels are unfailingly horrid to their fathers at all times, it is important to remember that 'the chips' are really only suppressing every teenager's desire to thoroughly appall their fathers, but will wait until they are 25 to run away to Droitwich with a divorced 45 year-old mother of ten who is the leader of an obscure cult of sexual deviants as well as a devoted fan of Bucks Fizz.

AuthorTxtSpk

Abbreviated sensationalism now adopted by man-babies and passive-aggressive Facebook attention whores. While children have not yet developed enough mental bandwidth to accommodate a K-Pop video, an emotional response and full-length vocabulary, it is believed that their adult counterparts have atrophied cerebellums entirely comorbid with chronic tyre paint or nail varnish consumption.