My daughter, my four-year-old daughter who apparently thinks she is 15, has become extremely rebellious. I take this as a sign of intelligence. She has reasoned out that grown-ups have most of the power, kids have very little, and she thinks this sucks. She was skeptical when I explained that we only tell her what to do because we want her to be happy and safe. She also dismissed the notion that she and her brother have it extremely good and that acceding to my will over things that she would choose to do anyway if she only knew more (like brushing her teeth and wearing clothing in 40-degree weather) was a small price to pay for living a life of leisure.

Her rebellion takes many forms. Most recently, she’s been pretending to have nightmares. At first we didn’t know what was going on. Slowly we realized that she wasn’t having nightmares at all, that it was an act. I’m not certain, but I think she enjoyed the fact that she could force us to come to her room several times in the middle of the night. I, on the other hand, was more than a little perturbed to be woken at 12:30, 12:45, 2:30, and so on, only to be grumped at and then dismissed by a little girl.

Once we realized what was happening, we tried to put a stop to it immediately. I told her that if she doesn’t cut it out that I’ll give her something to really have nightmares about. That was a joke. My lovely and talented wife told her something like: we know you’re pretending, stop it, we all need sleep, this is not the way to solve your problems, we’ll talk about it in the morning.

And just like that, the “nightmares” stopped. At least, they did for last night.