How can I spur my kids to play in the backyard when the neighbour gets so cranky?
Q: My kids enjoy playing backyard ball-games. When the ball goes over the fence, the woman next door always yells at them. With the new restrictions on social media for kids, shouldn’t we actually be encouraging them to get offline and outside? T.T., Vermont, VIC
A: Yes, we should encourage kids to get off their brain-zapping devices and engage in healthy, outdoor activities that will benefit their physical, social and mental development … but, then again, I once lived next door to a kid who kicked his football over my fence about 75 times a day and I seriously contemplated bursting his ball with a screwdriver and throwing its flaccid carcass back over the fence, yelling “Your balls are next!”
Because it can turn you mildly psychopathic when kids regularly climb over your fence to get their ball or scream over your fence for you to throw their ball back or poke an improvised, MacGyver-like, ball-scooping invention over your fence, made with a fishing rod, duct tape and their mum’s DD bra. That’s why I have the smallest skerrick of sympathy for your yelling, child-hating, fun-shunning, mildly psychopathic neighbour; she could’ve even been me if I lived in Vermont and had one less Y-chromosome.
But of course we want our children to enjoy the energetic, innocent backyard games that we all grew up with, so maybe take your kids around to this neighbour’s house with a box of chocolates and offer to put up ball-blocking fence trellises, or work out a convenient time of day when the kids can go into her backyard and quietly retrieve their balls. I would’ve appreciated a polite gesture like that from the footy-kid next door. I’d have had all his footballs lined up for him. And they wouldn’t have been skewered onto garden stakes like tiny Game of Thrones decapitations.
Read more from Modern Guru:
Is it rude to keep listening to my podcast while my partner is talking to me?
Is it bad luck to throw out my old Bible?
Am I being precious about how to use my tea towel?
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Danny Katz is a columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He writes the Modern Guru column in the Good Weekend magazine. He is also the author of the books Spit the Dummy, Dork Geek Jew and the Little Lunch series for kids.