Spud doesn’t necessarily like it whenever we tell her that Mama and Papa are going to go out for dinner after we put her to bed. In her little head, she could not comprehend the need for her parents to be out; after all, shouldn’t we all be asleep like she does?

When she was a little baby, we would put her to bed and leave her with the Nanny as we do our rounds of night out every once in a while. When she got a little bit older and became more aware of her immediate surroundings,  Silver Bullet and me have both always taken the time to explain to her why we needed to go out, who we are going out with, where we are going and when will we get back home.

It was relatively easier at first, but the explaining got a little tedious and challenging when she was about 2 years old.More often than not, the news would seem a little devastating for a little child to take and would result in Spud whining, crying and sometimes, a little bit of temper tantrums all rolled into one.

Having witnessed and experienced the cries, the alternative of sneaking out and not telling her anything about us going out would have been a much easier thing to do. There were plenty a time when I was actually very tempted at the thought that perhaps, it will just be easier to lie to her and not have to deal with her tantrums and whines. It was also an easy way out to protect her from the “pain”. But the thought was quickly discarded just because we felt that lying wasn’t exactly the right thing to do and we weren’t going to instil the value in her that lying under any circumstances is OK.

The alternative to that really was to tell her the truth, go through the motion of Spud crying and whining in our faces right around bedtime, let her deal with the news whether she likes it or not, calm her down as much as we could by telling her that Nanny will be around and that we will get home in no time, with the eventuality that she is going to go to bed and us, out of the door.

While it had seem a little difficult at first, we also came to realize that in the end, regardless how much she whines, she doesn’t really have much choice but learns to accept it. And no, there is no guilt of whatsoever on our end.

These days, the crying, whining and tantrums have been much lesser. We continue to explain things to her as calmly as we could to minimize the drama. She still tries to push her luck (by coming out of her room every 5 seconds, in which we would impose a consequence on her by taking away her bedtime buddies), but at least she does it without the manic temper tantrums. The Nanny usually does not have any trouble with her the moment we walk out of the door as she conks out pretty soon thereafter.

For us, this has been a classic case of conditioning. As parents, sometimes, you really do have to be cruel to be kind.