Harpo's Rules

Harpo

The following are Harpo's Rules for raising kids from his autobiography Harpo Speaks. Not a bad set of principles for life in general either. They are stated here utterly without permission and probably in egregious violation of numerous statutes and contractual obligations...which violations I sincerely hope would meet with his approval.
But, just in case, run right over and buy your very own copy at The "Why A Duck?" Bookstore or Stefan Timphus' Bibliography. Both pages have direct links to Amazon Books.

"We didn't run a very proper or conventional household, but the joint was never dull either.

At the end of the war we enlarged our house. We threw out the butler, disconnected the buzzer on the dining-room floor and got rid of all the rest of the Beverly Hills nonsense and converted the dining room into a poolroom.

The next thing we threw out after the butler was Dr. Spock.

I was the same kind of father as I was a harpist - I played by ear. But I've been lucky on both scores. The harp has given me a decent living and my children have given me more pleasure than I ever thought a man could possibly have.

What rules we had, as a family, stemmed from the fact that all of us has been adopted by each other. We've always had equal amounts of gratitude and respect mixed in with our love for each other. Susan, an only child who never had any roots, and I, a lone wolf who got married twenty years too late, were adopted by the kids as much as they were by us.

Somehow, without lecturing or threatening or studying any books, we all followed the same rules, from the time the kids were very young:

Life has been created for you to enjoy, but you won't enjoy it unless you pay for it with some good, hard work. This is one price that will never be marked down.

You can work at whatever you want as long as you do it as well as you can and clean up afterwards and you're at the table at mealtime and in bed at bedtime.

Respect what the others do. Respect Dad's harp, Mom's paints, Billy's piano, Alex's set of tools, Jimmy's designs and Minnie's menagerie.

If anything makes you sore, come out with it. Maybe the rest of us are itching for a fight too.

If anything strikes you as funny, out with that too. Let the rest of us have a laugh.

If you have the impulse to do something you're not sure is right, go ahead and do it. Take a chance. Chances are, if you don't you'll regret it - unless you break the rules about mealtime and bedtime, in which case you'll sure as hell regret it.

If it's a question of whether to do what's fun or what is supposed to be good for you, and nobody is hurt by whichever you do, always do what's fun.

If things get too much for you and you feel the whole's world's against you, go stand on your head. If you can think of anything crazier to do, do it.

Don't worry about what other people think. The only person in the world important enough to conform to is yourself.

Anybody who mistreats a pet or breaks a pool cue is docked a month's pay."

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