You'll Thank Me Later!

I am late with my bi-monthly unofficial challenge again, but there's still almost three full weeks till the end of December, so I hope it's enough to come up with a short story.

Write about parenting advice that probably shouldn’t have been given—or at least shouldn’t have been phrased quite that way.

Parents are supposed to guide, encourage, discipline, and protect their children. Fortunately for writers, they don’t always do it gracefully.

Maybe your mother warned you against climbing a dangerously rusty playground, “If you fall and die, don’t come home!” Maybe your father’s idea of encouragement was, “If you’re going to do something stupid, at least don’t get caught.” Maybe Grandma insists that babies should be allowed to cry because “it strengthens their voices and lungs.” Or perhaps someone has offered you completely unsolicited advice about raising your own children, and you’re still wondering how their children survived.

For this challenge, write about inappropriate parenting advice. It can be advice given by a parent to a child, or advice given to a parent about how children should be raised. It can come from mothers, fathers, grandparents, relatives, friends, strangers, teachers, parenting experts, or that person in the grocery store who has known your child for approximately forty-five seconds.

The advice doesn’t necessarily have to be bad. It might even work. What makes it inappropriate could be the timing, the wording, the assumptions behind it, or simply the spectacularly questionable method of delivery.

Make it funny, affectionate, outrageous, uncomfortable, poignant, or dark. Write fiction or nonfiction. Revisit something you were actually told, invent the world’s worst parenting manual, or put some truly terrible advice into the mouth of a fictional parent.

Just remember: good intentions do not guarantee good advice. And good advice does not guarantee good parenting.

Requirements:

• Write up to 100 words (no lower limit, brevity is the key here).

• The piece must be written as a clear piece of advice on parenting.

• Publish in any appropriate community that accepts microfiction and link your story in the comments on this story.

• As always, I will tip $1-5 to the advice stories I like the most.

• Deadline - November 30, 2026.

And as always, here's my own example, to start us off:

When I was about seven, I loved making faces: crossing my eyes, sticking out my tongue, twisting my mouth silly.

Once, Grandma got fed up, “Stop that!”

Naturally, I didn’t.

“Imagine someone sneaks up and hits you from behind while you’re making that face. You’ll stay like that forever!”

I froze. Fortunately, not with my tongue out.

Grandma knew everything. Who was I to question established medical science?

I imagined spending the rest of my life staring at my own nose, tongue hanging out.

Terrifying!

I stopped making faces. Grandma’s method worked.

NB: when reason fails, try lifelong psychological trauma.