Parents make empty threats to their kids all of the time. I totally feel you should occasionally follow through on some of those threats--I've even written about it before (here). A lot of these threats I remember my mother using on me and even then I thought 'yeah, right. Like that's gonna happen." As a mom I still have that thought, yet I still use them with my kids every now and then.
1.) Get ready to go or I'll leave you here. No way in hell I'll leave you home by yourself. Not until you can pee without getting it all over my bathroom. So at this rate: never.
2.) Get dressed or I'll take you to school naked. I will totally never do this to you. You'll either enjoy it too much or not even care and I'll be the one smiling nervously at the school principal.
3.) Eat your dinner or I'll stop feeding you. As if. You know if you don't eat properly I'll be shoving food at you!
4.) I'm not doing anything about it if you get hurt. And I'll be the one holding you while the doctor stitches up that 3 inch gash in your arm. You know, the one that you got because you didn't seem to hear me tell you to “stop doing that” at least a billion times.
5.) Don't make me come in there or you'll be sorry. I really have no idea what I'll do once I come in there. Just please behave so I don't have to come up with something.
6.) Come take a bath this instant or you'll go right to bed. No way in hell I am letting that sticky, smelly body of yours into clean sheets. It's the end of the day and I'm just totally not in the mood to wrestle you out of your clothes and into the bath.
7.) Pick up your toys or I'll throw them away. I'll be damned if I throw away thousands of dollars in toys that I paid for!! Just stop being a shit and pick them up because I almost broke my back when I tripped on Barbie and Ken making out in the corvette.
8.) I'll stop this car right here and come back there. We're in the middle of traffic. I couldn't stop if I wanted to. Plus, by the time I find somewhere to pull over, park, get out, and climb in the back seat, I've added at least an extra twenty minutes to our trip, which will make us late. Knock it off and believe me!
9.) That's it, I'm taking you back to your real mom. That demon child, thrashing about on the floor because you can't have a cookie since you didn't eat your dinner, surely cannot be mine. Could it? No, impossible. I must have been given the wrong child upon leaving the hospital. I'm quite certain no child of mine could act that way....
10.) Do you need me to call your father? I don't even know what this fully means. Really, like what is he going to do? It's not like he can come through the phone to provide more empty threats.
11.) This is the last time I'm going to ask you....Until tomorrow, when I'll ask you to do this same thing another hundred times.
12.) I'll call Santa. Really I'm just going to call other mommies to bitch about the rough day I'm having, but if you think I'm talking to Santa about that Barbie Dream House he won't be bringing, then points for me.