My husband and I established early on, way before we’d even brought our son home, that ours would be a non-spanking home. And we’ve stuck to that, though my husband has had his moments when he’s reconsidered, wondering whether it might be just the thing to turn around a child who clearly already thinks corporal punishment is a-okay considering his history of biting, pinching, kicking and hitting. The thing is that you can prepare yourself as much as possible, reading every book available about the best way to discipline a child, but once you actually have the child in front of you, all bets are off. Not to mention that the authors of those books tend to wildly disagree with each other, and occasionally even themselves, sometimes within the same book.

Since we brought home a child of two years of age who had already been unbelievably spoiled by his foster parents and had essentially never received any form of punishment, we had to try several methods before finding the right one to suit his needs, personality, and understanding – particularly as he spoke no English at all to start with. Sadly, brainwashing, while effective, is one of those techniques that will get you a little visit from Child Protective Services, so we had to stick with other options like time-outs, rescinding privileges, removing toys, and spending large swathes of time alone in his room. Unfortunately, this last one is hardly a punishment considering what most kids’ rooms look like these days, filled with toys, computers, televisions, and stereos. What every home really needs is an extra room with no windows, padding on the walls so the child can’t hurt himself when he flings himself at it repeatedly in an attempt to garner your sympathy and attention, and possibly some sort of protective wear to keep him from hurting himself, like, say, a straight jacket.

Not that I’m saying all children are insane and should be locked up, but… well, maybe that is what I’m saying. Certainly children can go through phases of behavior that seem like utter madness to adults.

Personally, I’ve always been a fan of allowing the punishment to fit the crime, which can sometimes be wickedly effective. Although there are some instances, for instance your child attempting to ride your basset hound without a saddle, that don’t resolve well into related punishments, unless you really want to saddle up your kid and let the dog drive him around the house for a bit. Though this may involve much duct tape (to keep the dog on board, of course) and may possibly end badly. One of the most genius moments that I remember of my childhood was the “candy diet” my parents put me on. If I remember correctly, it was after Halloween and I was whining and complaining about not being able to eat all my candy at once so that I’d be up all night barfing it right back up (but damn it, that was my right, having done all that begging to earn it.)

So my parents introduced the “candy diet”, under which rules I was only allowed to eat candy. Nothing else. If it wasn’t sugary or chocotastic, it wasn’t on the menu. I believe I lasted about three days before begging for a plain old sandwich, possibly of the tuna variety. And I still believe that that “diet” is the reason behind my lack of love for chocolate and sweets. You have to admit, it’s pretty genius.

The problem with these kind of punishments, is that the kid has to be old enough to really understand them. Now that my son is five, I think it’s time. If he says something insulting to me, I’ll be walking him to kindergarten in a house-coat and gold lamé leggings, possibly wearing fringed cowboy boots and curlers in my hair. And I can’t wait to make some really thrilling public service announcement-type plays and puppet shows using his favorite characters. No sense waiting until he’s an adult and allowing Hollywood to ruin his childhood heroes, right?

And one day, maybe he’ll even have enough fodder to write a book about his childhood -before he passes these same penal codes down to his own children.

What’s been most interesting to me is watching him learn English. For the longest time, he almost seemed to refuse to put any effort into learning our language at all, preferring to point and scream (as you might see any American tourist do in a non-English-speaking country.) But then one day, it was like a switch was flipped and he went from single words, to short phrases, and then he suddenly was speaking full sentences, and I was left wondering who the heck this strange chattering creature was who’d apparently replaced my son in the middle of the night.

My son will be five later this month, and with his burgeoning language skills I’ve discovered lately that having a kid this age is kind of like having an oracle around the house. Any question you might have, he has an answer for you. Unless, of course, that question is, “have you brushed your teeth?”

Feeling guilty about something you’ve done?

“No bedtime stories for you.”

Wondering how to end that first date?

“I WANT A GOODNIGHT KISS!”

Doctor trying to prescribe you a suppository instead of oral medications?

“I’ve got a penguin in my bum.”

Sex and reproduction education?

“I’m going to drink a lot of water and then my baby will come out.”

Feeling under the weather?

“I’ll get my screwdriver and fix you up!”

And. Um. I have no idea:

“I eat my eye. Boop boop. And my mouth. Um. Mummy? Some spaceships have good guys and some spaceships have bad guys, right? I’ve got strawberry teeth. I am a bad guy.”

He’s admittedly still behind the average five-year-old in language skills, but he continues to grow in leaps and bounds, and it’s amazing that one day you realize you’ve been having a real conversation with this kid that doesn’t involve screeching or hitting stuff. Our guides told us that the babbling he appeared to do as we wheeled or carried him unwillingly around the sights in China was just that: babbling. He really didn’t speak any Chinese before we brought him home, so to me this makes his language skills all the more impressive.

I’ll leave you with this final thought: if teaching your Chinese-American son to say “What’s-ah happenin’, hot-stuff?” is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

When my unloved and unwanted Baby Alive shuffled off this mortal coil because I refused to feed her (okay, in actuality her batteries died, possibly of neglect), I came to the conclusion that I should probably never attempt motherhood. Animals? Sure, load me up. But babies were a no-go.

My husband and I agreed on this child-free policy for the first decade of our married life, until strangely, in our mid-30s we both came to the simultaneous conclusion that our lives weren’t filled with quite enough chaos and that it was time to discuss children.

Unfortunately, I am physically unable to have my own children, but having been adopted myself, adoption had always been pretty visible on my internal radar. We skipped right over the idea of fertility treatments or IVF, and all those fun things that go along with them, like mood swings, bloating, and the possibility of having a litter. We signed up with an adoption agency who, after an extensive interview process which included background checks, family histories, and possibly some questions about our preferred underpants style, recommended international adoption as the best choice for us.

During the adoption process, which took about three years from joining the agency to arriving in China to meet our son (and would have been several years longer had we not moved to the Special Needs program), I read a lot of articles and personal blogs about international adoption. Most of these made the whole thing sound like a journey of rainbows and unicorns, and I’ve discovered that it’s not really accepted to say anything to the contrary. But I’ll be honest with you, adopting our little boy was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Probably for him, as well. In our case it was more like that unicorn had stabbed me through the chest with his razor sharp horn and then just run around for awhile with me impaled on his forehead, you know, just because he could.

Our son was classified as a “special needs” child as he’d had a severe heart condition as an infant, although by the time we brought him home he was perfectly healthy. He was one of the lucky ones, in that he spent most of his early life with a foster family rather than in institutions or orphanages. But of course, that meant that he was strongly bonded with his foster mother and he grieved her loss deeply. So it was hard all of us, but we weren’t actually supposed to talk about it.

We met one couple while in China who were adopting their second little girl, who were willing to talk about the difficulties in adopting these somewhat damaged children. They told me to just keep reminding myself that it will end, things will improve, and that a year or two from now we won’t even remember how difficult it was. They also gave us a bottle of Benadryl for the long flights back to America, which was invaluable considering how our flights within China had gone. Let me put it this way: you know those parents whose kids scream and scream when you’re on a plane, and you just wish you could open the emergency exit and shove them all out? Well, that was us. On our 1.5 hour flight from one city to the next, our son went on a 20 minute screaming jag that we just couldn’t stop. We felt awful about it, but there wasn’t really much we could do except walk him up and down the aisle to spread the sound of his screaming evenly around the plane.

When we returned from our two week trip to China, I had to go back to work immediately, while my husband got six weeks of what was essentially paternity leave. So the new father and son bonded and got to know each other, and I tried to write functional software code while being interrupted every 20 minutes by the desperate screams emanating from my cell phone. Not from our son, you understand. My husband had little to no previous experience with children, let alone angry, grieving, non-English-speaking little demons dressed in adorable toddler-skin. So he was a little out of his depth, and I spent a lot of time talking him through trying to discipline this whirling dervish of animosity who was spoiled like a piece of rancid meat by his foster parents. The poor kid had never been told “no” before, and it came as quite a shock to him that he couldn’t do or have whatever he wanted whenever he wanted.

And then, at the end of the day, I’d straggle in from work to spend time with a little boy who refused to sit on my lap or really have anything to do with me at all, which was devastating to me. He had given his heart to another woman he considered his mother, and I was a usurper to the throne and he just wasn’t having it. It took a long time for him to accept me, but the first time he spontaneously hugged me, sat voluntarily on my lap for longer than two seconds, or told me that he loved me, it was like the most precious gift.

And in the end, with enough time, patience and understanding, the three of us formed a solid, loving family unit. Three years later, he is a happy, healthy and, according to everyone who meets him, incredibly adorable little boy who thrives on wreaking havoc wherever he goes. And every time he grins up at me and tells me, “Mummy, I like you!” or compliments my paper airplane skills, it just reminds me that every difficult minute was worth it.