The rule.

Growing up, my family had one big, unspoken rule that we were all expected to abide by. It was that none of us would ever stab anyone else with a fork at the dinner table. And the unspoken consequence for breaking this rule was that Mom and Dad would take your bed outside and light it on fire. "Hope you like sleeping in a big pile of ashes, outside with the raccoons," Mom would say as your bed burned down.

But, luckily, no one ever broke the unspoken rule. We had our fair share of dinnertime incidents, like shouting perched atop a chair, or biting off part of a drinking glass, and once my brother stuffed a piece of Kix cereal up his nose and had to go to the hospital (I guess that was at breakfast - never mind). But the fear of our beds getting torched helped us keep our forks to ourselves.

In retrospect, it might have been nice to have had that rule clarified during a family meeting, so that we kids knew exactly what the definition of "stab" was. Because think about how many friendly dinnertime fork fights we missed out on.