June 26, 2024–Harpo Marx, the wigged, honking jester of the zany Marx Brothers, was serious about two things in life: playing his harp, and being a parent. He was so serious about parenting, that he wrote out 10 rules, which, as you can see, were not “serious” serious:
Harpo Marx Family Rules
- 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 to 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’s all the rest of us have a laugh.
- If you have an impulse to do something that 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 whichever you do, always do what’s fun.
- If things get too much for you and you feel the whole 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.
(Source: HarposPlace.com)
His oldest son, Bill, claims these are not a gimmick or part of his stage routine. They were actually written out by Harpo and enforced with all four kids.
Wouldn’t it be an illuminating exercise to write out your own Family Rules?
It is not as easy as it sounds. It’s interesting how we studiously plan out every aspect of our lives and careers, from “what do you want to be when you grow up” to how to change the oil in your farm truck.
But parenting is something we get no training in whatsoever. Yet we all assume we know how to be a parent, based on the flimsy premise that we all had parents at some point. It’s like how everyone knows how to be a teacher because they sat in a 4th-grade classroom.
Everyone, as a child, I’d bet, swore at some point that “I’ll never do that” when you were treated unfairly by a parent. Alas, we grow up and, like The Lost Boys leaving Neverland, lose our child-like innocence and become just like our parents.
Bill Marx used that word with intention when describing his father: child-like. His was the kind of spirit that would wake up his 4-year-old daughter at 3 am so they could play jacks.
“My dad was the most child-like adult I’ve ever known,” Bill Marx said. “Not ‘child-ish’–an unattractive quality that suggests a certain selfish insensitivity. That wasn’t Dad at all. No, he took the world in the way a child does–with lots of wonder and very little judgment… with the delight of someone for whom everything is new and delightful. The great comedy parodist of song, Allan Sherman, wrote, ‘Harpo Marx had the good sense to never grow up.’”
It is interesting that his son noted that Harpo never had a childhood of his own. He grew up poor in a large family, and went to work on stage at a young age, traveling the country and staying in flophouses on the vaudeville circuit with his brothers. Maybe that’s why he relished a second childhood so much.
That’s your homework. If you plan to have children, if you have children, if your children have children, or if you never had children, write up your own Family Rules.
Do it for the child in you.