5 Kids, 1 Wife: A Guide to Having Fun as a Parent

By Scott Tennant

If this guy can raise kids, so can you...

The chaos of parenting leaves little time for self-reflection and even less for celebration. We dwell on everything we could be doing better as moms or dads while seldom reveling in our successe

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blue Devil Publishing
• Release date: Sep 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9798988823711

Scott Tennant

Scott Tennant is a lifelong resident of Wickliffe, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. He and his wife Terry have five children and two cats. It used to be five kids and five cats, but honestly, that was just too much.Scott is Director of Global Communications, Electronic Materials, for Materion Corporation, based in Mayfield Heights, Ohio. He received his Master of Science degree in Integrated Marketing Communications from West Virginia University and his Bachelor of Arts in English and History from John Carroll University. He is also an Accredited Public Relations Professional (APR) with the Public Relations Society of America.Scott is an active public address announcer for high school and college athletic events in the Cleveland area, most notably for Wickliffe High School. There he is privileged to serve as the voice of Blue Devil football, basketball, soccer and volleyball, in addition to the often-imitated-but-never-yet duplicated Wickliffe Swing Band.He blogs regularly at www.5kids1wife.com.Scott has also appeared as a contestant on two nationally televised game shows, winning cash and prizes on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" (2003) and "The Price Is Right" (2007).

Book preview

The world begins evaluating your children the moment they’re born

Our family, September 2000, shortly after Melanie was born.

February 6, 2012: If you’ve ever had a baby – or, like me, have watched your wife have a baby – you’re probably familiar with the Apgar score.

The Apgar score is a way for doctors to assess the health of a newborn. It takes into account things like pulse rate, muscle tone and breathing, and it’s done on a scale of 1 to 10.

I can’t remember the exact Apgar scores of my children, but I’m pretty sure they were all around 9 (there may have been one 8 in there, I don’t know). What I do remember is that none of them got a 10.

In every instance, this genuinely offended me as a father. These kids were seconds old, dripping in goo and in some cases still physically attached to their mother through a slimy umbilical cord, and already someone was judging them … and finding them lacking.

Wait, why didn’t my kid get a perfect score? What’s wrong with her? She’s beautiful and perfect, DO YOU HEAR ME? PERFECT!

I was, of course, an idiot. The Apgar score obviously is not a measure of a baby’s worth as a person, but right away I became The Overbearing Protective Father.

If one of my kids had received, say, a score of 5 or less, I guarantee my thought process would have been something like, Oh no, there’s something wrong with him. All the other kids are going to make fun of him. He’ll have no confidence and won’t be able to get into an elite kindergarten. That will put him on the ‘normal track,’ and Harvard and Princeton will never accept him. I’ve already failed as a parent.

(NOTE: If this sounds neurotic to you, it is. I’m a far mellower dad now than I was when we first had kids, though even then I mostly kept my insane thoughts to myself. Thankfully.)

I bring this up in the wake of Solo & Ensemble Contest, which we attended recently. For those who aren’t band geeks, Solo & Ensemble Contest – or just Contest, as it’s commonly known – is an annual event in which instrumental and vocal students perform in front of judges, who give them ratings from 1 to 5 … or actually I to V, since they use Roman numerals.

Not every band kid participates in Contest, but a lot do. Terry and I did when we were in high school, so between that and the fact that their private lessons teachers would find it unacceptable if they didn’t, Elissa and Chloe also endure the Contest experience each year.

What happens is that your band teacher or private instructor assigns you a piece to perform, usually something classical and challenging to play. Then you practice it for months in preparation for a single 10-minute period when you have to play it for a judge. The goal is to earn a I (superior) rating because … well, I don’t know the because. Really, until this moment, I never considered why this is done. To make you a better musician? To teach you something about the value of hard work and discipline? To humiliate you in front of others? I’ll say yes, yes and yes.

The kids put a lot of work into the process, and it’s always nerve-wracking when it’s time to walk to the performance room and play your piece for evaluation. Nerve-wracking, that is, for the parents. The kids get nervous, too, but nothing like the parents, believe me.

I hate the whole Contest experience because I’m afraid my kid will feel like a failure if he/she falls short of his/her goal. And since the kids have my nonsensical, stress-inducing tendency toward perfectionism, the goal for them is always a I. Always. They’re little overachievers, and I’m afraid they’ll slit their wrists if they get anything less than the top score.

Honestly, I don’t care if they get a I or not. I would like them to earn the highest rating, of course, but it’s not that big a deal to me if they don’t. But it IS a big deal to them, and I don’t want them to feel bad. So I worry. And I get really nervous. And so does Terry.

When Elissa was playing her solo at Contest a couple of weeks ago, I glanced over at Terry and noticed she was doing the same thing I was doing: looking straight down toward the floor. I did it because it made the knot in my stomach even bigger if I looked at Elissa while she played. Terry did it because she figured eye contact would make Elissa more nervous. Our family is just one big, sensitive Ball of Nervous at Contest. What should be a fun experience instead shortens each of our life spans by five years.

I feel the same way at spelling bees. The whole thing is unpleasant for me. Really, any event in which my kid will be evaluated, judged, assessed and/or otherwise put up for appraisal makes my insides churn. I know it’s good for them, but I don’t like it.

Now Elissa is a senior on the verge of entering college, and the whole competition thing is even worse: What’s your class rank? Your SAT score? Your ACT score? Your grades?

This Sunday she and two teammates will be taping an episode of Academic Challenge to air on Cleveland’s WEWS-TV Channel 5 in the spring. They’ll be up against two other schools, which means there will be a winning team and two losing teams. Get that? Only 33% of participants will succeed, while the other 67% will fail. That’s the way it is, and either way my heart will be racing.

It makes me look forward 20 years into the future when we’ll have grandchildren, and my kids will be the ones doing the worrying. Of course, I’ll probably get even more nervous for the grandkids’ events and competitions. Maybe I should just have the inevitable heart attack now and get it over with.

The necessary evil of Chuck E. Cheese

February 27, 2012: Jack got invited to a friend’s birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. You veteran parents know how this works: You go to Target, buy a gift in the toy department, wrap it, take your kid to the House of Cheese and either drop him/her off (if you’re smart) or else agree to stay and help supervise.

My good friend Lenny Luscher once called Chuck E. Cheese Babylon for kids, and I think that’s pretty accurate. Contained within those four walls is every possible kid form of sin and vice … and, thanks to the addition of beer and wine to the menu, some for the adults, as well.

The rides and games vary by Chuck E. Cheese location, but there are at least three constants no matter which one you visit:

A jumbo-sized Habitrail in which kids crawl around and share germs with others their age

A variety of games that introduce them to gambling by offering tickets for the winners

Noise – lots and lots of noise

That last point is crucial. Do not go to Chuck E. Cheese thinking you’re in for a relaxing time while your child eats pizza, ingests mass quantities of sugary soda and plays skee-ball. The Cheese Experience is loud, and it’s almost always uncomfortably hot. Little kids will constantly run into your knees like tiny Ndamukong Suhs, trying to get from one activity to the other. No matter how well you have trained your children, they will quickly conform to the pattern of obnoxious, rude behavior so favored by the tiny denizens of The Cheese.

And yet, I would argue the world needs Chuck E. Cheese. It wouldn’t bother me if I never walked into one again, but it’s my firm belief that there’s a certain ying and yang between grown-ups and kids that needs to be maintained.

Think of it from a child’s point of view. Ninety-five percent of the time, kids are forced to live, work and play in decidedly adult-oriented environments. Even when they’re around other kids, like at school, they do it in a setting created and sustained by adults.

Chuck E. Cheese is one of the few places they can go that is entirely theirs. That fake Chuck E. Cheese band up on the stage? They love that. Seriously, they may not admit it, but listening to that animatronic band strike up a bluegrass version of The Farmer in the Dell for the 27th time in less than an hour is like scoring front-row seats to Led Zeppelin for them.

The games, the grimy ball pit, the noise … this is paradise for small people. They can do what they want for as long as they want (or at least until the tokens run out), and no annoying grown-up is going to yell at them for being too loud or for having too much fun.

Trust me, this is a good thing. If we the people in charge were to take away their last 5% of freedom, they would revolt. There would be a full-scale kid revolution if we shut down Chuck E. Cheese and places like it. These kids (who already tend to be fast and agile) would be angry, and pre-adolescent anger is sufficiently powerful to destroy civilization as we know it.

The Chuck E. Cheese people understand this, which is why they offer booze. They don’t want you getting crazy ideas in your head about how their environment is probably damaging to your child’s long-term mental health, so they offer up fairly low-cost Chardonnay and Budweiser to head you off. That nice little buzz not only gives you the stamina to endure the chaos, it also keeps you from setting fire to the place.

As parents and as a society, we need The Cheese.

We already hug our kids a little tighter

(NOTE: This post was written shortly after six students were shot at Chardon (Ohio) High School. Three died. Chardon is about a half hour east of us, and my niece was just feet away from the shooter when he opened fire.)

February 29, 2012: The last thing you want or need is 500 words from me about the Chardon High School shootings. Other than having a niece and nephew who are students there and who thankfully escaped safe and sound, the whole thing really has little to do with me.

And even if it did, what do I know? I’m not going to tell you anything new. I’m not going to give you any pearls of wisdom to make sense of the whole thing. I have no insights and little advice to offer.

But I will say this: What happened in Chardon on Monday morning in no way made me hug my kids any tighter or feel any more apprehensive about dropping them off for school. I’m no more worried for their safety today than I was last week.

Why? Because my approach to parenting has always been to operate at a consistent state of low-level panic. I don’t show it very often (people will describe me as being laid back … I wish), but deep down, every day I run through a mental checklist of Things That Could Go Wrong for the Kids.

What if they get hit by a bus? What if they get into a fight? What if someone picks on them? What if they fail a test?

And yes, what if some kid brings a gun to school? That’s something that crosses my mind from time to time, because I live in Wickliffe, Ohio. We in Wickliffe dealt with our own school shooting back in 1994, five years before Columbine and long before school shootings became tragically commonplace.

A heroic custodian was killed and two staff members and a