"I've....been singing at the table, all the livelong day...."

Yes, I admit it sounds a little strange: my husband Rick put our son Tim in a time-out for singing “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad” at dinner last night.

Tim is 13 ½, which means it had been approximately eight years since his last time-out. But beyond that, it’s kind of a strange offense, by most families’ standards.

It’s also somewhat emblematic of our household. Rick and I have fairly stringent guidelines when it comes to rambunctiousness. And we felt that Tim’s insistence on bursting into song after being asked repeatedly to refrain from doing so was nothing if not rambunctious.

Although it was the first time in recent memory that the situation had escalated to a time-out, Rick and I frequently impose restrictions on dinnertime comportment. It’s not just the obvious things that most parents would object to, like eating with fingers instead of silverware or throwing food. It’s matters as seemingly trivial as exchanging inanities.

These are the kinds of moment non-parents simply can’t picture: the speed with which a family dinner involving a nine-year-old and a 13-year-old can devolve into silliness. When we deem a conversational exchange too stupid, we require a change of subject.

This is the part that all the experts in family dynamics and child development never seem to address when they discuss the importance of the family dinner hour. “Families should sit down to a meal together as often as possible,” they all tend to agree. But what about what happens at that meal? Are we wrong to insist that family dinner means an interesting exchange of ideas and not the goofiness that Rick refers to rather colorfully as “flippity-flappity”?

I don’t mean to make us sound like ogres. In general, we’re okay with silliness. But dinnertime is different. I tend to work fairly hard to get dinner ready for all of us, and when we finally sit down, I want to enjoy it with peace and quiet and interesting discussion. It doesn’t need to involve political discourse or scientific theorems, but it has to involve syllables that are real words and a bare minimum of what the fictional heroine Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle calls the “I-Thought-You-Saids.” (“What? Grandma and Grandpa are planning a vacation? I thought you said Grandma and Grandpa were scamming some Haitians!”)

So yes, family dinnertimes are important, but some standards need to apply, and last night, the standard was no boisterous singing of American folk songs. Still, I felt a little guilty when Tim was sent to his room. (“Can Holly come with me?” he asked. “No,” Rick said. “Can the dog come with me?” No again. In truth, it had been so many years that we’d all forgotten the rules of a standard time-out.) My guess is it boisterous singing at the table won’t be a problem again, unless Tim eventually takes up a career in dinner theater. In which case he’s absolutely justified in not giving us any credit whatsoever for his success.

Singing for joy, singing while vacuuming

My 7-year-old sings as she makes her way around the house. When she is playing, she sings quietly, long rambling sequences of fairly abstract phrases, as opposed to songs with melodies and lyrics of the sort she might learn in school. When she and her friend Samantha get together, sometimes they sing together in a more organized fashion – verses of a favorite from music class or a Disney movie – but when she’s by herself, she sings just as sort of background noise to keep herself company while she plays.

She also sings questions or observations sometimes. “Mommy may I please have some more orange juice?” becomes its own little melodic sequence, and so does “I can’t find my shoes today; they aren’t where I left them.”

I love hearing her sing. I love the good cheer it connotes, and its gentle yet joyful way of communication. I seldom sing myself because I have a scarily bad voice. When I do break into song, it’s usually to amuse the kids and it’s usually a matter of making up ad hoc lyrics intended to motivate a specific action on their part, such as the song I made to get us out the door on time, paying homage to “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” by The Animals: “We’ve gotta get out of this house, if it’s the last thing we ever do! We’ve gotta get out of this house. Or we will miss the bus, and have to walk to school.”

In the past few days, my son has started singing, and it’s a mystery why. Tim, who is 11, never sang around the house. On Sunday, we needed to clean the house quickly, and Rick asked him to vacuum the upstairs bedrooms. With the vacuum running, we could hear him belting out “Row, row, row, your boat!” On and on he sang as the vacuum ran. I suppose it’s like singing in the shower: with noise and rhythm to back you up, it’s easier to let it out. Still, it’s not typical of Tim, and I was amused. When the vacuuming was done, he continued singing.

So much so, in fact, that Holly grew annoyed. She’s not used to having to talk over the background noise of Tim singing and asked him to stop. He reported to me that Holly was crying because of his singing. Then Holly started to cry. When I asked her what was wrong, she said, “I wasn’t crying! Then Tim told you I was crying because he was singing, and that made me cry!”

Oh what a tangled web we weave, I thought to myself. My usually withdrawn and rather downcast son seemed to be brightening up and had discovered his loud singing voice for the first time in my memory; meanwhile my usually sunny daughter was crying over false accusations of, well, crying. Parenthood is never dull, even when the details seem to be.

Tim continued singing frequently in the days that followed. Could his cheery outbursts of song be an unexpected change with age? Some of the other boys we know who are his age or just a little older, immersed in pre-adolescence, seem to be growing moodier and more sullen. Wouldn't it be ironic if my son, who has always had a moodier mien than most of his friends, did the opposite as his teen years approached?

Another interesting angle is that a new pediatrician we visited for the first time last month when Tim had a slightly sore throat that I erroneously thought might be strep recommended that Tim start taking vitamins with iron. He’s been taking them for about two weeks now. Hence, singing? It seems like a stretch, but the evidence is bellowing its presence in front of me. Chalk one up for Fred Flintstone grape-flavored chewables, and someone please find me a tuning fork.