What magic persuaded our son to shower? A teacher

It was only Wednesday. The boys didn’t have sports that day, and there weren’t any big arguments in the house, so naturally I was curious why our 10-year-old son was headed to the bathroom with a towel in his hands.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he replied. “My PE teacher said we should take a shower every day, and use deodorant.”

It turns out my reaction to this random act of cleanliness was the same as my husband’s a few minutes earlier. We both said, “Did you tell your PE teacher that we’ve been telling you that for years?”

And by telling, we mean begging, nagging and fighting about? Who knows, we’ve probably even bribed him to shower a few times. (What? Positive behavior incentives are all the rage in schools right now.)

Our son just smiled, shook his head and headed to the shower.

And that’s when I came up with quite possibly the best parenting idea ever: We need to hire a freelance teacher — or give cash bonuses to our kids’ current teachers — to talk to our kids about all of the things they don’t listen to us about.

If the plan worked out like the showering situation, we’d have kids who did their chores without grumbling, were nice to their siblings and kept their rooms tidy.

They’d never dream of talking back to their parents or rolling their eyes, because hire-a-teachers would explain that’s very disrespectful. They’d finish their homework every night, eat plenty of vegetables, and automatically limit their time in front of television and computer screens.

It’s not that we don’t talk about all of these things. We do. In fact, we’ve thoroughly covered several of those topics over and over again until we’re blue in the face. But occasionally our loving parental advice seems to fall on deaf (and sometimes grimy from lack of showering) ears.

When they get older, perhaps our hire-a-teachers could share important advice that every parent wants to get right, but sometimes misses the mark: the dangers of texting and driving, underage drinking, unprotected sex, uninformed voting and other seriously bad choices.

When they’re out of college, hire-a-teachers could help ensure that our kids’ credit scores stay high and that they succeed in their careers. At some point, I’m sure we’d want hire-a-teacher to explain the importance of choosing only the highest quality retirement facility for their parents.

The shower incident reminded me of when our daughter began kindergarten. We were so proud when, as a 3-year-old, she picked up a pen and wrote the first letter in her name and followed it by a scribble. But over the next two years, she refused to practice writing the rest of her name. It was almost as if the other three letters of her name didn’t exist. (By the way, she practiced writing the entire alphabet throughout preschool, so she knew how to write all of the letters.)

During her first week of kindergarten, she brought home an assignment with her full name neatly penned at the top. I told her that I was happy to see the rest of the letters written in her name.

She said, “Yeah, my teacher said I need to write it that way.”

Oh, the power of teachers.

This story was originally published May 30, 2015 at 8:00 AM with the headline "What magic persuaded our son to shower? A teacher."