This article originally appeared on Fatherly.
If you’re like most parents, when your kid’s first full written sentence is “Dad is fat,” you go find a book about how to raise respectful children or properly address body image issues. If you’re Jim Gaffigan, you go write a book about how to be a good parent when you have no idea what you’re doing—and use that sentence as the title. Gaffigan has plenty to say about parenthood, and for good reason; his brood of five kids provides endless material, including these 12 timeless revelations.
On How Kids Perceive Sleep Compared To Adults
“Bedtime makes you realize how completely incapable you are of being in charge of another human being. My children act like they’ve never been to sleep before. ‘Bed? What’s that? No, I’m not doing that.’ They never want to go to bed. This is another thing that I will never have in common with my children. Every morning when I wake up, my first thought is, ‘When can I come back here?’ It’s the carrot that keeps me motivated. Sometimes going to bed feels like the highlight of my day. Ironically, to my children, bedtime is a punishment that violates their basic rights as human beings. Once the lights are out, you can expect at least an hour of inmates clanging their tin cups on the cell bars.”
On Your Actual Purpose For Toddlers
“I used to wonder why I had hair on my legs, but now I know it’s for my toddler sons and daughters to pull themselves up off the ground with as I scream in pain.”
On The Law Behavioral Averages
“Children have a tendency to behave as poorly as the most poorly behaved kid in the room. The laws of physics dictate that if there is a kid screaming and running in the hallway of a hotel, all the other children will scream and run in the hallway of the hotel.”
On The Flawed Programming Of Toddlers
“Toddler judgment is horrible. They don’t have any. Put a 12-month-old on a bed, and they will immediately try and crawl off headfirst like a lemming on a mindless migration mission. But the toddler mission is never mindless. They have two goals: find poison and find something to destroy.”
On Whether Or Not You’re Qualified To Be A Parent
"Every night before I get my one hour of sleep, I have the same thought: ‘Well, that’s a wrap on another day of acting like I know what I’m doing.’ I wish I were exaggerating, but I’m not. Most of the time, I feel entirely unqualified to be a parent. I call these times being awake.”
On Kids’ Music
“There should be a children’s song, ‘If You’re Happy And You Know It, Keep It To Yourself And Let Your Dad Sleep.’”
On What It’s Like For You When You Have A Lot Of Kids …
“You know what it’s like having a fourth kid? Imagine you’re drowning, then someone hands you a baby.”
… And What It’s Like For Everyone Else
“Big families are like waterbed stores; they used to be everywhere, and now they’re just weird.”
On Babies Versus Roommate
“Babies are the worst roommates. They’re unemployed. They don’t pay rent. They keep insane hours. Their hygiene is horrible. If you had a roommate that did any of the things babies do, you’d ask them to move out. ‘Do you remember what happened last night? Today you’re all smiles, but last night you were hitting the bottle really hard. Then you started screaming, and you threw up on me. Then you passed out and wet yourself. I went into the other room to get you some dry clothes, I came back, and you were all over my wife’s breasts! Right in front of me, her husband! Dude, you gotta move out.’”
On That Cat Steven’s Song
“The song goes, ‘Morning has broken,’ and I’m pretty sure my children broke it. Like everything else they break, if they did break it, they’ll never admit it.”
On Sleep Training
“There are two philosophies when it comes to getting young children to sleep. There is ‘sleep training,’ which basically involves putting your kids to bed and listening to them scream all night; or there is ‘attachment parenting,’ which essentially involves lying down with your kids, cuddling them, and then listening to them scream all night.”
READ MORE ON FATHERLY
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On The Secret To Life
"People treat having a kid as somehow retiring from success. Quitting. Have you seen a baby? They’re pretty cute. Loving them is pretty easy. Smiling babies should actually be categorized by the pharmaceutical industry as a powerful antidepressant. Being happy is really the definition of success, isn’t it?”
