Yesterday I wrote about how we got our daughter to swim by telling her that she couldn’t.

I want to just add, briefly, that it is not always a good thing, this humiliating your child with various burning words.

Case in point: on return from that same gloriously flamingo’d state where Dalia learned to swim, we had a layover in Tampa. And we sat here, we sat there. Our Continental was delayed two hours, so we sat somewhere else. And in the last place that we, as a family, sat, we were seated directly behind some kind of grandmother from hell, and her two tortured grandchildren.

These kids were older. Maybe 7 and 9? The younger a boy, the older a girl. They were by far not the worst kids I’ve seen in an airport environment. But there had been some running. Maybe some bickering. Apparently the boy burped. I know this because the grandmother started talking on her cell phone, and talking about the burp and other transgressions, with someone whom she apparently felt bore responsibility for these uncouths.

I should say, at this point, that this grandmother was Asian: perhaps Filipino. Her grandkids were mixed. Not that it has anything to do with the matter at hand: this was no Tiger Mom. It was Batshit Mom.

“I don’t know what to do with these children,” she said loudly.

“They have no class.”

“They are just burping. And they are farting. They are making me look bad.”

“I think you have to come and pick them up. I don’t want anything to do with them, ever. They are so disgusting.”

Of course, this was inside security at an airport; there would be no picking the kids up. But she didn’t want to have the kids picked up. She probably wasn’t even talking to a live person on the other end of her phone call. Her audience was seated right next to her–the kids. And–bravo!–her little monologue had its intended effect: the kids, those sinful creatures, started crying.

But it was not enough for grandma.

“They are just terrible. I knew they would be. And now they make so much noise, everybody looking at them, thinking what bad kids they are.” And so on and so on.

I had that same urge that I have when some mother, say, smacks her kid in public, which is to butt in, and interrupt, and correct and scold the adult. And I did what I always do in those situations as well, which is: nothing. It’s not just my bystanderish nature; it’s perhaps even a good idea. Humiliating a humiliator could just worsen whatever treatment the children get, even as it pushes it out of eyesight. But that could be a self-justification for inaction. I don’t know.

My own dilemma, pathetic as it was, was ended by our flight boarding. The kids, however, were stuck there with this woman, this crone, this abuser of children. And worse, she is their blood.

Usually, I’m not a proponent of this theory: generally, any individual who needs five years to learn to wipe his own butt, as has been the case with JP, doesn’t rate too high on the intellectual scale. But this little boy’s analysis and internalization of the modern dynamics of marriage is incisive. And he plays ping-pong, which is cool.

Okay, this isn’t so much a post as it is a miniature contest. Or a cry for help. Make that a scream from the pit of my stomach. Basically, I need your help, you brilliant DadWagon readers, to name a phenomenon.

Here is the phenomenon: Kids, from the time they become mobile, seem to have an unerring instinct for bashing Dad in the balls. With feet, hands, head, robot frogs, books, magic wands, and three-wheeled scooters, they’re like heat-seeking missiles—crotch rockets, if you will—that always manage to find their testicular targets. It often feels like destiny (painful destiny), in that no matter how far away the kid is from you, no matter what kind of soft toy they’re playing with, your balls are in danger.

So, in the vein of the Washington Post Style Invitational, I’d like you to help me name this situation. Points will be given for cleverness, extra points will be given to those who buy me a beer. The winner will receive nothing but the glory that comes from being highlighted on the biggest little dadblog in the world. Post your entries below.

A child’s development is a strange, lurching thing. You are convinced you kid can’t (or in some cases can) do this-or-that, and then on a dime, it all changes.

This is how it went on Friday with my daughter.

The skill: water-survival.

The backstory: for years now our daughter, an intense and thoughtful five-year-old who is also prone to moments of deep physical cowardice, has had a conflicted relationship with pools. She loves them, of course: what child doesn’t? But she hates the anarchy of water, how it gets in your nose and mattes your hair, how it threatens to swallow you up whole at any moment. Her solution, improvised in a child’s manner, has been to gird herself with a mountain of gear and even more false bravado.

As in: here she is, with little pink flippers, a mask and snorkel, and a Coast Guard rated child’s lifejacket cinched tight around her chest, taking small steps into a bathwarm pool, careful not to wet her hair. She steps into open water, grasps onto a little inflatable boat for a moment then comes back to the steps, saying: “see, I told you I’m a good swimmer!”

(For a rather exact portrait of her in the water, see Sergio Makes a Splash, a brilliant picture-book from my former colleague Edel Rodriguez, about a penguin who is not afraid of all water, just “the very deep kind.”)

My wife and I, ever helpful and encouraging in the style of parents who tell their children they did a great job when they crap in a toilet, applaud her accomplishment and tell her, when she returns to the step, that she’s a very good swimmer indeed.

Except, of course, that she isn’t. But it was only when my sister-in-law, a Miamian who would know about such things, pointed out that overconfidence can be a dangerous thing around the water, that we realized we were maybe doing our daughter a disservice by agreeing that she was a good swimmer. Maybe she realized that she actually wasn’t and was just saying so to seem brave or good. But more likely, we thought, she really thought that she was the kind of swimmer who could, say, jump off a boat or go into the pool with not adults around, and make it back to shore.

So on Friday morning, our second-to-last day of vacation in Key West, where I’m from, my wife set about to crush her little delusions like a grape. “You know, you can’t really swim,” my wife started, as Dalia once again boasted in the pool. “You have a life jacket and a little rubber boat, and that’s not swimming.”

Our daughter protested, but the mother was just getting warm.

“It’s important for you to know that you really can’t swim, because we don’t want you thinking you can be in the pool by yourself.”

And then my wife did something that proved unexpectedly clever. She spelled out what swimming really is: using your arms and legs to move through the water, without a lifejacket or rubber duckie or floatboard or anything like that.

We thought this would all defeat our daughter, make her cry a little, but help save her in the long run.

Instead, she took it as long-awaited instructions. She stood on the step, unbuckled her lifejacket, pushed into the pool, and swam.

As in, really swam. Feet behind her, arms working, body planked: she just swam. Straight across the pool.

And as she reached the far side, she picked up her head and asked, “like that?” without any trace of bravado or challenge, just a curiosity about whether that was indeed swimming.

For the next twenty minutes, she swam on her own. She joked around by floating still or frog-paddling. She didn’t panic or yelp or flail her arms like she had in the past. It was astounding.

So there you have it: one brief tiger-flash of cruel truth unlocked some internal ability that none of us–including her–thought she had. So my resolution for today: remind her that she can’t read and point out that her Spanish is crap. Then tonight we’ll be reading Cervantes in the original.