The politics issue

Now, to get back to why school time is so much torture for the kids, we have to deal with the fact that as much as the kids don't like being told that they're woefully ignorant and have poor study habits, having to deal with clashing personalities is just as big a burden. As we're going to see, Lizzie spends a lot of her free time obsessed with how she's no longer the center of attention and with how she doesn't understand the social dynamics of the playground. What this means is that at some point, she's probably going to tell her children to beware of playground politics.

This is because the Pattersons love to use the word politics to describe how awful it feels when they aren't handed everything they want on a tray. As by way of example, I'm sure that the Delicate Genius is writing some sort of twaddle about how Liz always used to win family politics because his greed, envy and malice were punished instead of lauded. Also, Mira's not realizing that her role was to meekly slink off somewhere and die so Elly could have all the attention meant that she was trying to dominate the Pattersons with her family politics. Family politics is why the EVIL CAREER WOMAN didn't admit that Liz was allowed to go everywhere she wanted, band politics is why Becky wasn't content to look like a fool so April could make a big jerk of herself and library politics is why Elly got herself downsized. If they don't understand something and don't like it because it means that they get less than the pig's share of everything, it's politics.