3-year-old Maggie Graham recently completed potty training, and her parents claim it was all due to a simple yet elegant parenting tool: telling Maggie that her imaginary friend Dotty the Spoon had likewise refused to learn about big-girl potties, and had been hit by a car because of it. 

“The results couldn’t have been better!” Raved Maggie’s father Louis Graham. “Our darling was on that toilet in no time! The only moisture on her pull-ups were the bitter salt tears of grief.”

This is apparently the latest triumph of Louis and his wife Elaine’s fatalistic parenting technique. Says Elaine, “Maggie used to smear her food all over her face at dinner. So one day we sat her down and told her, ‘y’know Maggie, while you were rubbing spaghetti-ohs on your face at dinner today, Dit-Do’ – her magic rhino friend – ‘drowned in the bathtub. Maybe if you’d have payed attention you could’ve saved him.’ After that, our napkin costs virtually disappeared!”

When interviewed by NFLT, Louis couldn’t resist relaying his personal favorite lesson he and Elaine ever taught their daughter. “For awhile Maggie wouldn’t brush her teeth, and at the time she was really attached to this stuffed bunny, so one day when she was at daycare I tore off one of its legs, and when she got home and asked about Molly Hopper, Elaine and I told her that Molly hadn’t been brushing her teeth, so sex traffickers kidnapped her and this was all they left behind. Every night when we walk past Maggie’s room and hear her shivering and waving away the perceived ghosts of all her imaginary friends, Elaine and I know we’re raising her right. Then we lock the tool shed for the night, in case she tries to dig up her old blankie’s corpse again.”