As you all remember from our previous lessons in parental physics, children have their own gravitational fields. This powerful force of nature causes them to amass a slew of “stuff” in their lives that accumulates disproportionately to their petite sizes. A child by age six, left unchecked, will accumulate more objects than they will own throughout the remainder of their lives. I know this to be true, because I read about it on the interweb.
Although a child’s gravitational field is a formidable force in the universe, there is an equally troubling (to the parent) force at play in the child’s life that parents need to get a grip on: tot-induced knickknack dispersal fields (TIKDF).
Dispersal fields are not new to physics, some of the earliest working theories date back to the Newtonian era, but it wasn’t until the 20th century that TIKDFs became accepted in parental physics.. It was the oft-derided Dr. Seuss who postulated that, despite having inordinate gravitational fields, tots have the capacity to disperse their knickknacks faster than they accumulate them. His research proved what many suspected, that a child could distribute the contents of an entire room faster than a parent could reign it all in again.
In my own household, I’ve witnessed the disruptive power of TIKDF myself. About six months ago, having reached a higher plane of enlightenment, my oldest child decided to tidy up her room. It took her an entire afternoon, and a bit of stuffing items under the bed, but she managed to whip her room into shape. By noon the next day, her room was a disaster again and we haven’t seen the floor since.
Unfortunately for Seuss, his satirical portrayal of his own research in The Cat and The Hat, cast a pall over his scientific work and many have forgotten or disregarded his scientific findings. Let’s face it, the idea that a cat could have scattered about the entire contents of that house is pure whimsy. Any parent knows who the real culprits were. However, a riding tidy-upper machine that sweeps, dusts, and puts everything in its place, well, that’s a machine this parent is still waiting for.
