Naturally, the little boy would run screaming to his mother, and she would have to come out and take the bully off the tricycle and put her little boy on again, This happened almost every day. What did the little boy want? It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to answer that one. His pride, his anger, his desire for a feeling of importance—all the strongest emotions in his makeup—goaded him to get revenge, to smash the bully in the nose. And when his father explained that the boy would be able to wallop the daylights out of the bigger kid someday if he would only eat the things his mother wanted him to eat—when his father promised him that—there was no longer any problem of dietetics. That boy would have eaten spinach, sauerkraut, salt mackerel—anything in order to be big enough to whip the bully who had humiliated him so often. After solving that problem, the parents tackled another: the little boy had the unholy habit of wetting his bed. He slept with his grandmother. In the morning, his grandmother would wake up and feel the sheet and say: “Look, Johnny, what you did again last night.” Scolding, spanking, shaming him, reiterating that the parents didn’t want him to do it—none of these things kept the bed dry. So the parents asked: “How can we make this boy want to stop wetting his bed?” What were his wants? First, he wanted to wear pajamas like Daddy instead of wearing a nightgown like Grandmother. Grandmother was getting fed up with his nocturnal iniquities, so she gladly offered to buy him a pair of pajamas if he would reform. Second, he wanted a bed of his own. Grandma didn’t object. His mother took him to a department store in Brooklyn, winked at the salesgirl, and said: “Here is a little gentleman who would like to do some shopping.” He would say: “No, I didn’t do it. You did it.”
The salesgirl made him feel important by saying: “Young man, what can I show you?”
He stood a couple of inches taller and said: “I want to buy a bed for myself.”
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