My premise is quite simple: some chairs are designed to be rocking chairs… other chairs are not. I consider it a failure of my parenting duties that my children remain prone to rocking on the kitchen chairs – a pet peeve I continually harped on when they were younger.
It doesn’t seem to me like this should be a difficult concept to grasp. For example, the throne in the bathroom is solidly fixed in position (if it’s not you have far greater issues). You would not imagine trying to rock on that seat. So why are the kitchen chairs so tempting in this regard?
In generations past, you had the traditional wooden rocking chairs where Mom was accustomed to sit in the wee hours of the night, soothing a colicky baby or nursing a hungry infant. We even have a replica wooden child’s rocking chair taking up space in our attic – unable to be pitched because we need to save it for our grandchildren (do you detect some family tension here — no prospects any time soon since none of my children are even married). But today you have all kinds of additional chairs with rocking capability.
That doesn’t change the reality that certain chairs were never designed to rock. In fact rocking weakens the integrity of the finely crafted furniture (maybe my kitchen chairs don’t quite rise to this standard of description). (How we obtained this kitchen set for free remains a story for another day. But in this case it is not true that “You get what you pay for.”) I can abide a lot of other socially questionable practices – e.g. if you want to put your feet up on the kitchen chair across from you (especially now since we no longer have six people packed around the table), that is OK. But just don’t sit there and rock as if you have some type of nervous fetish that must be satisfied. Am I being unreasonable here?