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The Disappointing Child is a somewhat nonsensical psychiatric book written by Dr. Beverly Hofstadter.

The Book[]

Penny greets Leonard after her psychology class and shows him her the book The Disappointing Child in "The Raiders Minimization" that his mother, Dr. Beverly Hofstadter, wrote.

The Raiders Minimization 4

Penny reading about Leonard in his mother's book.

Leonard complains when he sees that Penny bought his mother's book The Disappointing Child. They talk about the chapter about potty training, bed wetting and masturbation. Leonard says "if something came out of me she wrote about it."

Penny mentions the breast feeding crisis. Leonard says it wasn't a crisis. He favoured the left one, so she was lopsided. Penny shrieks in delight and says he still goes left.

In Penny's apartment, she asks Leonard why a five-year-old boy put on his mother's make-up and put on "balloon boobs". Leonard denies they were boobs, as oppose to muscles and the make-up was green because he was the Hulk. He wrote off the fact that he wore his mother's bra because he didn't want the balloons to get saggy. He says he was the Hulk because he was always mad at his mother and he wanted to smash his way out of the house. One of the reasons he was so angry as a child was his mother designed an Easter egg hunt with no eggs to see how long he would keep looking. He kept looking until June.

Penny seduces Leonard to make him feel better so Leonard uses the book to get out of hanging out with Penny's friends and get takeout and watch The Hobbit Blu-ray with Commentary, have sex at work, watch a six-part documentary on Monty Python and anything he could guilt-trip her into.

Leonard tells Howard about it in work, he tells Bernadette about it (after he fails to try the same thing), she tells Penny who tells Leonard's mother.

Penny tricks Leonard by dressing up sexily and surprises him with a webcam chat with his mother on Skype. She wants to discuss why Leonard keeps involving her in his sex life. When he was six, Leonard walked in on his naked parents while his mother was spanking his father with his new ping-pong paddle and Leonard's mother wanted to know how that made it feel. Leonard had thought that that incident had been a nightmare of his youth. Leonard calls Penny to come back because he's "sad for real".

Trivia[]

  • Howard tries the same thing with Bernadette, saying how lonely his childhood was.
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