The goal here is to teach my daughter to respect all living things. I have that clearly in my mind.

It seems to be going fairly well. She’s four and occasionally is rough with the cats or squeaks that we “have to kill” a bee that flies past her head, but she’s generally very gentle and kind. She likes to watch the spiders weave webs and the ants carry food…

The ants. That’s the first problem.

When we’re outside, I have to remind her not to squish the ants; she is confused, of course, because I squish the ones inside the house! We get them every year (earlier and earlier, it seems), and even when they seem to be gone when we use natural means of getting rid of them, they’re back! And even when we have a professional treat them (still with an eco-friendly formula, at least they claim), like we did this year, they still come back as well! We live in a very old house filled with cracks and crevices, with plenty of woods behind us—so you can see that it’s an optimal situation for those ants.

This, of course, makes me the Sovereign Supreme Hypocrite of All the Land. I tell my child not to kill ants, but I still kill them in the house. She asks why and I say because they will get into our food, but it even sounds lame when I say it out loud. How to remedy this situation?

Then there are the June bugs. Those poor, weird, and yes, ugly, bugs that come out every spring and summer and live for about a day, who fly into our screens and doors and generally just make us a little creeped out. The other day, one was twitching and dying on our front porch and my daughter asked what we could do. I told her we could step on him to put him out of his misery, which is what I learned to do when I was a child. But the look on her face when I did it—as she said, “You do it, Mommy,” when I asked her—shattered my soul! What did I just teach her? Should I have simply said to leave him alone? I do believe it was the humane thing to do, but was it really?

I know I might sound like a crazy person worried about these things, but the fact remains that my little girl is learning from me and my actions every single day. I would love to hear what other parents think about these issues and any insights you might have from dealing with your own children in similar situations.