Learning Day: 2,002 Ways to Show Your Kids You Love Them (Patreon)

As the "best-selling author of seven books in the 2,002 series," Cyndi Haynes, by sheer raw numbers, is maybe responsible for publishing more stupidity than any other writer. Without any expertise, education, wit, reflection, or editing, she has sprayed every half-remembered tidbit of wisdom from her unremarkable life and mind onto pages no one expected anyone to read. Well, I did, and this entry-level guide to loving your own children sucks.

In the year 2000, Cyndi published 2,002 Ways to Show Your Kids You Love Them, an amount of love far, far beyond her means. This woman knows, at best, about 11 ways to love her children. Once her reader learns they can "worship the Christian God," and "take the child to public places" they can skip more than half the book. I can't stress enough how many of the 2,002 Ways to Show Your Kids You Love Them are just taking them to the park or the zoo or restaurants. Cyndi will probably be shocked to discover this, but I have the books to prove her parenting style is 70% identical to seducing a woman in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Okay, parents! Now, in no particular order, are some of Cyndi's best ideas on how to show the most precious things in your life that you care about them!

Smile at them? My God, it's crazy enough to work, Cyndi! Okay, we need to start with a serious talk. This is shocking for a couple reasons. The first is obvious: no piece of advice could be more unnecessary. If you need to be reminded of smiles, it's too late and the creatures you walk among have uncovered your deception.

The second reason is less silly. This is number eighteen. Of two thousand and two. Which means we still have 1984 entries to go and Cyndi Haynes has already decided the reader knows fucking nothing about anything. It's a place every tidbit author gets to. By its nature, the act of listing every last thing about a subject is a stupidity that escalates. Combine that with the narcissism it would require to think you could or should write this book, and eventually the only reality the tidbit author can perceive is one where their every thought is life-changing wisdom. But holy shit, if Cyndi is still in the teens and her soft brain has already reached the "my readers need to know about smiling" stage, it's going to be a rough book.

I shouldn't be able to know this from a book format like this, but I want to point out how Cyndi is a terrible writer. This is such a clunky way to say "laugh with your child." That would have been almost cute. But "have a session of laughter? That lasts for a long time!?" What the hell are you talking about? How? You maniac!

What's frustrating is I think this is her way of "jazzing up" her advice. This is Cyndi trying to add details and flair to her primordially basic wisdom. Or maybe even her tiny fish mind knew that by #1438 she had to have already written one about laughing and thought adding the word "session" would make it technically count as new advice.

I bet she does this a lo-- hold on, let me flip through this book and check something...

Ha ha ha there it is.

By the end of the book Cyndi has completely lost track of her thesis entirely and is just giving you unrelated tips you either didn't need or already fucked up. This is a book about showing your child you love it and Cyndi Haynes just offered "Never have a child to repair a shaky marriage." Does she think after 1972 entries, someone is going to say, "Wow, that's something to think about. Should I, the childless reader of almost all of 2,002 Ways to Show Your Kids You Love Them, even be having children?"

Not all of Cyndi's brilliance is quite right for numbered tidbit form, so she sometimes does little... I don't know what you'd call them... senility tests? Here she lists the six most popular toys in the world, not from a poll or retail analysis, but her own guessing. I'm not sure why or what went wrong with your skull where this might help you, but better luck next book, LEGO and Cars! And congratulations once again to Puzzles, Computer games!

Whoa, I'm not sure what happened here.

Okay, this one makes sense. We all express love this way. And I know what you're thinking. "This one isn't funny. He's using 'teach your child not to be superstitious' to set something up."

You were right! She shows love by teaching her kids not to be suspicious because silent, unseen beings are always protecting them! Like I mentioned before, a lot of Cyndi's affection is based around reminding her children the Bible is real. Since these things aren't related at all, all it does is imply that if you're not a Christian, you don't love your children. Sorry, atheists and savage ethnics, you simply can't know what it is to love like someone who never gives only underwear for a birthday or Christmas gift.

"Fuck, am I still in the four hundreds? Come on, think, Cyndi. Something about smiling? Our Lord Christ? His holy angels watching us change our clothes... Oh! OH! Give more than mere underpants for Christmas!"

- Cyndi Haynes, best-selling author of 2,002 Ways to Show Your Kids You Love Them

Ha ha ha holy shit. Okay, Cyndi. I guess you never mentioned the smiles could be "gigantic." This counts as a new one.

I thought I should do a nice one to demonstrate how not all of Cyndi's contributions to the world are garbage. A collection like this would be a sweet book. Not helpful, or necessary, but an uninspired parent or visiting bodysnatcher could open it for little examples of human activities. Making ice cream together as a family is great! No notes!

And sure, Cyndi, the widely recognized "National Ice Cream Month" would be the perfect time to do it!

Okay, Cyndi, fine. We could also go out and buy the ice cream from a truck.

Or just get the ice cream from anywhere, sure. Cyndi, I honestly think all your readers went into this book knowing "ice cream" was an option. This is not an adorable guide to showing kids you love them anymore. This is a sad hungry woman who misses her family getting ready to settle in for a night of milk farting alone.

Cyndi, you have to stop. What is your endgame here?

So this was your goal, Cyndi? Replacing all food with ice cream and pie? I guess when you have angels watching you don't need to worry about your health.

Cyndi, kids are smart. Your child knows these ice cream rampages aren't about them. You have a problem, and they can see it with every hysterical ice cream attack you make. Oh, sure, they say, "Hooray, ice cream for dinner again! Ha ha ha ha ha ha this session of laughter shall continue for a long time, mother!"

"We have ice cream and ice cream to be placed any way you can imagine on a bed of ice cream. Let your creativity run wild, daughter!"

I didn't chop off the bottom of this one. Let history recognize that on entry number one thousand, one hundred and sixteen, Cyndi Haynes started listing good time candy options and the only two she came up with were "maple sugar" and "rock." She made a bulleted list for them! For two types of candy!! Two is a smaller number of types than you'd find in a single bag of candy!!! If someone starts listing candies and ends after two, that's not a hot candy tip, that's a stroke.

Ha ha ha I've never seen anyone give up as hard as Cyndi Haynes did the very moment she sat down to type her seventh book. There is no more hilariously lazy answer to the question "how do you show your kid you love them" than "I don't fucking know, a big ass bag of candy?" Ha ha ha you goddamn stupid piece of shit, Cyndi.

"I don't know how they could have gotten so many cavities, Dentist Gary. One of the ways I show love is to only let the kids chew sugar-free gum. A lot of people don't understand this, but that means there's no sugar in it. My job? Well, I write advice books for parents and horny Christians, why do you ask? Speaking of, are you single, Dentist Gary? Maybe we could continue this over six boxes of ice cream, your choice."

Careful, you don't want to mix this up.

Wait, nevermind. You can mix this up all you want and it's fine.

Okay, I get it, Cyndi! I messed up! It works with any combination of words and temperatures!

This seems cynical, but closer to wisdom than another bag of candy.

Wait, now I'm worried the only wisdom Cyndi is trying to impart is how books and magic aren't real. Except for the Bible, I guess. I honestly don't know how to interpret this. If anyone else said it I'd assume it was an allegory about how real growth takes work and awful men don't become better simply because you fuck them. But with Cyndi, she might actually mean "none of these frogs are cursed princes, trust me."

Cyndi checks the edge of her blade, giving a satisfied nod to the perfect line of blood now flowing from her thumb. "Pray for your enemies, son. And while you're talking to God, tell Him He'll be seeing them soon. Mommy will be right back."

In the year 2000, there was nothing more alluring to children than tales of elderly intrigue broadcasted only while they were at school. But if you loved your children, truly loved them, you had to forbid it!

There comes an entry in every pointless list author's book where they say, "try making a list," but this is the first one I've seen where they tell you to try buying a different pointless list book. As poor decisions would have it, I own a copy of The Wish List by Barbara Ann Kipfer, and let me give you a taste of what that Cyndi is recommending:

The Wish List is nothing more than a checklist of things, most of them specific vacation spots, many of them truly impossible, and a weirdly random amount of them were left blank. My copy is used, so I know the previous owner has a walk-in closet, once went on a retreat, and she's forty (oh, this is fun) indefinitely. She has never done her duty, and Vidal Sassoon has not cut her hair. And while she has never made a 100 yard kick return, she did do something pretty funny in her copy of this stupid book:

On page 138 she ignored every single other entry (even curing acne and buying an airline!) only to check the box "lighten my schedule." Then she stopped checking boxes in her copy of The Wish List and gave it to a used book store. It's a fantastic and relatable story of human triumph, told with one squarish scribble. Anyway, let's get back to how to love your kids.

You know how you're always saying, "I wish there was a loving chair for my child!" Well, you fool, you goddamn idiot, it was there all along-- your lap!

Like most of Cyndi's entries, this feels like it was rewritten one too many times and ended at a strange place. I think she knew her enraptured readers were expecting more from her than "711. Keep your child safe," but for her to revise it to "I guess do your best to keep them safe," implies something terrible happened. This is how the saddest person you've ever seen would end her speech at a Mothers Against Coal Gas conference.

Oh no, how many of these are about putting in the tiniest bit of effort to keep your child alive?

"Mom, sometimes it seems like you don't really love us."

"What are you talking about? I put that candle out last week."

I wouldn't call a locked pool the universal sign for love, but any potential pool owning readers need to know they can be dangerous. In fact, all writers listen: the moment you remember people can drown, stop the book you're writing to remind your readers to put a locked fence around their swimming pool, if they have one.

Or stay nearby to make sure they're not in there drowning, that works too. Cyndi, this is two pool safety ones in a row-- how many of the children did you lose to the water? This is getting sort of sad, let's see if I can find a happy one.

No, that's kind of dark.

Oh my god, Cyndi.

Hey. Cyndi. What the fuck is the tone of your book? You maniac.

What!? Cyndi, did you just suggest I cure my sick child's unusual illness!? I... let's take a minute and try something. Let's imagine this woman, Cyndi Haynes, at a party with leaders in her field. Picture her floating behind a group of educators, pediatricians, and child psychologists while they discuss their struggles, their success stories... then Cyndi butts in to say, "Yeah, totally. It's like how I tell my readers: if your child has become sick with an unusual disease, you could try, and here's the tricky part-- looking it up! I'm... I'm like you guys. Right?"

The point I'm trying to make is how it's easy to forgive insultingly basic advice in the context of a book like this. The stupid has been stacked so high you can't remember what smart looked like. So it's important to take a step back and remind ourselves what this woman would sound like in our world-- she thinks she knows more about Googling the name of your child's disease than you, the hypothetical parent of the child with the rare disease. She is maximum dingbat know-it-all. If you glued a phone to her ear and every parent in America called her to tell her to shut the fuck up, Cyndi Haynes would not hear it enough before she died.

I'll think about it, but there's no better way to demonstrate how much you love your own kids than by running over someone else's.

A single tear falls down the author's cheek, one for each of her remaining children. "It's too late for me," she tells the eight tiny urns. "All I can do now is help other parents not make the same mistakes."

"It's too late for my children, but maybe not for yours. Hi, I'm author Cyndi Haynes and I have what's known as overactive condescending threat assessment syndrome. Please... never tickle too firmly. Not even once."

Oh. I was kidding, but all jokes aside, this is not the kind of thing a parenting author publishes in her book if her daughter is still alive.

Remember when you only saw one set of footprints? That's when God was killing all your unattended children.

Alright, it looks like Cyndi gives up and lets God take over every 400 entries or so. But as a book critic, I think a self-help author should stop their book zero times to say "Sometimes give up because that's what God is for."

"Of course, mother. You are to be the only woman in my life, mother." Sorry, let me see if I can find a less creepy one.

No, that's not it.

This barely means anything, which makes it weird you worded "nothing" like this, Cyndi.

This seems weird, Cyndi.

I don't think I like this one either.

I'm helplessly lost. What? Cyndi, what the fuck?

No, Cyndi, repeating it doesn't help. What are you talking about!?

Aww, now here's a sweet one. Give your child a small share of your heart. Thanks, Cyndi. Wait, a big share? Why, that's an even better idea! Let's do some more helpful ones.

This is great advice to all you parents who never figured out Monopoly and thought, "I could just not tell this little fucker."

And this is great advice to all you parents who betray your children at any opportunity, and with nothing on the line.

It's really something to see a mind like this work. "Something about lost dogs?" Cyndi thinks. "Find them," she decides. And yet she knows her readers expect more. "No, but really find them so hard," she adds.

Early in the book Cyndi still had big dreams about how you could improve the life of your family...

... but 1135 entries later, she had adjusted her expectations.

Somewhere along the way Cyndi discovered a self-help author lifehack...

It's complicated, but let me see if I can explain it...

You take a thing, and listen closely, you double it. It's the cheat code to parenting. Doing a thing, yet also doing it again is the ice cream of anything. It enhances every aspect of love. For instance...

... if you really love your children you won't mock their dreams twice.

Warning: if you're sending your child a loving fax, you only need to do it once.

Okay, Cyndi. When one of the ways to show your kid you love them is to fax your kid you love them, we're done. Take your book to hell with you, you hard-tickling idiot. You sexless mooncalf.

Well, maybe let's just do one more.

Holy fuck, how much money did Cyndi make from this stupid shit?

...

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