Michael K. All your examples are of children who are in charge and not the parent. An example from my life in rearing three wonderful boys; Eldest boy learns to cook porridge in the mike at age 8. Every Saturday morn. cooks porridge for all three. After several weeks youngest, age 4, jacks up; Not porridge again, I'm sick of porridge. Eldest; well, that's all I can cook. Dad steps up to youngest, who's looking at his bowl of porridge. Are you going to eat that porridge ? Youngest - no. Dad upturns porridge bowl onto the head of the dissenter and grinds porridge into the hair. Child not hurt but shocked. Lesson; if someone goes to the time & effort to prepare you a meal, you damn well eat it. Result ; our boys ate, just about, everything put in front of them. Yeah, probably through a little fear in the early days but just the other day we were talking about the "porridge incident" and the boys, now 18-22, said; Gee dad, we're glad you were tough on us with food in the early days, now we can go anywhere and eat any thing, some of our friends are so fussy it's ridiculous. Well, I felt warm all over, part of the battle plan actually worked. The social engineers among you are probably horrified at my methods, yeah, there are more, but none that involved spanking or physical violence, and today I'd probably get 10 years in the bluestone college for the same action. Today we spend a lot of time in each other's company and we sing, and we laugh, and we thoroughly enjoy life.

JG / FME