If you have sons, put up a fence and raise them in the backyard

Locked in the back yard, Nathan, Robert and Harrison always found a way to entertain themselves, leaving me with time to read, nap or clean house.

At lunch at the Taco Stand last week, a friend of mine confided that he and his wife are considering starting a family. Children.

I took this opportunity to provide him with the best bit of parenting advice I could give.

“Get a house with a fenced-in backyard,” I told him.

Gone are the days that a fenced backyard will do me any good. My kids are all big enough now that they can scale a chain link fence or knock out the boards of a wooden fence. But when they were small, a fenced backyard was the finest piece of parenting equipment I could ask for.

“When they were little, Jean used to work on Saturdays,” I explained to my buddy who was confused at how a fenced backyard would help with parenting. “On Saturdays, I put a padlock on the gate so they couldn’t escape, and I put the boys in the backyard. I’d lock the door coming back into the house, and that was the only way I got any peace and quiet.”

My friend laughed, but I was serious. When Nathan and Robert were 3- and 2-years-old and Harrison was 7-years-old, nearly every Saturday I locked the boys out of the house.

Harrison, of course, was big enough to get over the fence, but he has always been a responsible kid, and if I locked him in the backyard and told him to watch his brothers he would do it.

With the boys locked in the backyard, experience taught me that I had about two hours, maybe two and a half hours, to achieve anything I wanted or needed to do.

It was on those Saturdays, with Jean at work and the boys locked up, that I was able to clean the house. You may think this is a waste of two hours of alone-time, but the bonus points I received for having the house clean when Jean got home from work were well worth the cost.

It also gave Jean the impression that I was some kind of Super Dad, able to clean house with three small children under foot. She had no idea I was locking them in a prison yard.

But those Saturdays also gave me the chance to watch a Georgia game on television if it was on early enough. About the time the second quarter started I would bustle the kids out the back door, lock it, and be left alone long enough to get through the end of the game. Back when the kids were small, this was my only option for watching an uninterrupted football game.

Or, if there was no football on TV, this was a great chance to read a book. Taking a full-fledged nap was risky – I didn’t want to be asleep on the couch when Jean got home from work with the kids locked up in the backyard, but if I dozed off a little while reading a book, no one was any the wiser.

And while it is true that I sometimes indulged in other activities, most often when I locked the kids in the backyard I spent that free time cleaning the house. The old adage that when mama ain’t happy ain’t nobody happy is true, and we were all much happier when Jean came home from work to a clean house.

To prolong my alone time, I would fix a tray of snacks and take it out to the table on the deck.

Taking them snacks was always a dangerous move. Harrison would inevitably beg to come in, and he was such a cute little kid with big, brown, pleading eyes that it was hard to refuse him. But somehow I would manage.

“Not yet,” I would tell him. “Being outside in the fresh air is good for you,” I would explain. And I’d push his brothers back from the door and slide back into the house.

It’s not like they were uncomfortable out there. They had a Power Wheels motorcycle and a Power Wheels tractor and a Power Wheels John Deere Gator that they could drive around the back yard. They had balls for any sport imaginable. They had Nerf guns they could chase each other around the yard with. There was shade and fresh air. And I didn’t have to worry that they would wander away.

And if they complained too loudly, I would remind them that they could be inside helping me clean house.

As the kids have gotten older and the challenges of parenting have increased, I have found myself thinking back fondly to those days when the boys were small enough that I could lock them in the backyard for a couple of hours.

There are times now, when they bicker with each other or refuse to do their homework, that I would like to lock them in the backyard. But unfortunately, those days are gone. They’re all big enough now to scale a fence, and I’m afraid if I were to lock them all up in the backyard they would strangle each other fighting over who should go over the fence first.

My friend laughed as I explained all this to him. He thought the idea of locking the kids in the backyard was hilarious. But I guaranteed him that before his wife’s second trimester is over, he’ll have a guy out measuring his yard and giving him prices on a fence.

I left him with this last bit of advice on the subject: “I would go with a nice, high privacy fence or a secure chain link fence, but I would not go with an invisible fence and a shock collar unless you want your wife to get really angry at you.”

 

Rob Peecher is author of Four Things My Wife Hates About Mornings. This column was originally published in 2009.