Imran Johri is a part-time humour writer, full-time father of three who finds the lighter side to parenting every chance he gets.
My wife Ivy and I have been insufferably competitive since the day we started dating. Whenever one of us issues a challenge, regardless of ridiculousness, the other will doggedly rise to the challenge.
Catastrophic challenges — ranging from “maximum number of deep squats while piggybacking the spouse” to “who can execute the highest heel click” — have often resulted in some form of unnecessary contortion (my way of saying don’t everyone go trying this at home).
This, of course, is also reflected in our parenting style. Anything and everything can be turned into a competition, so I’ve passed on this streak to my kids. The longest-running competition, which is still hotly contested by our kids, is the “who can make Baba laugh uncontrollably” league.
Its popularity is not due to some altruistic motivation to bring joy to the father, but rather, each successful joke or comedic action is justly rewarded with points that can be traded for money. The going rate? A dollar a point. And I get to decide on how many points per effort, based on some system of Bababear-type arbitrary-ness mixed with how many tears of laughter were shed.
Leading the points tally is my eight-year-old son who wrote a riotous story in his journal about the adventures of an otter and his lion friend, who just happens to like chomping down on villains. Trust me – it’s a cackle and a half. He scored himself a whole two points.
When it comes to Ivy, it’s not about the giggle meter but who can understand what Mummy is talking about in Malay! That’s right, Ivy may be Chinese but her Malay is better than mine and the kids’ (she grew up in Malaysia with Malay as her first language).
Ever so often, she would point out some comment on TV and ask for a better word to be used in its place. Alas, only our Malay has improved but no point has ever been won – yet.
To us, our act of challenging each other is in some way an ego-boosting activity, but mostly to inject some healthy contest among ourselves. It’s also a great way to learn anything.
What we compete on are relatively harmless and geared towards some measure of resilience-building if you lose.
If their joke falls flat, I will call them out and they don’t get a point. They will learn to deal with the disappointment, but we make sure it’s not something so big they can’t recover from it – simple as that.
And I can see it working. In the case of my son’s guffaw-inducing otter and lion story success, his sister felt compelled to go one-up on him.
Over the next few days, we found her furiously reading joke books to increase her repertoire for funny stories. It didn’t take long before she sat me down and told me her ridiculously intricate story of talking-animal tomfoolery.
Good try, but she failed to score a point, mostly due to the convoluted nature of the joke. She took it in her stride and now knows better than to overcomplicate a story for the sake of humour.
That was, however, a huge win in our eyes for comedic literacy and better storytelling ability in our household. On our kids’ part, they know that the points don’t come easy but when they do, it’s currency well-earned indeed.
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