LAS VEGAS — There's a new sound in our house, one that resembles some sort of annoying toy but instead is coming from our 5-year-old daughter.

Listen. I'm sure you can hear it, or maybe you hear it in your house, too.

It's the whine, and it goes something like this:

"But I want to go riiiiii-ght now."

The voice slides upward on "I," then downward on "right," then back up again on "now." The whine has such good runs in the voice and changing of notes, in fact, that I wonder if some funky singer might record it as a single.

This is new, this torturous sound. It started in the last few months, perhaps when aliens started channeling through her. It is truly an out-of-this-world, awful sound.

"Mooooo-mmmy, I want to go, tooooooooo."

What the heck happened to her normal voice?

Sometimes I mimic the voice back to her, so she can hear what it sounds like. She laughs, and performs it again.

I've tried uttering phrases such as: "I can't stand whiney kids" or "What are you even saying?" But the best way I have found to deal with the dreadful sound is just to ask my daughter to use her normal voice. Otherwise, I don't respond.

She doesn't like that at all.

Marilyn Heins, a Tucson, Ariz., pediatrician who offers parenting advice on her Web site www.ParentKidsRight.com, said kids whine because it's effective. For example, when a child asks for a cookie and doesn't get it, the child may keep begging for it in a whiney voice. The parents get so annoyed, they eventually give in.

"If it's happening a lot, it's usually because of how the parents are handling it," Heins said. "The way to stop it is to change the behavior of the parents."

First, she said to make sure the child knows what whining means. In a quiet moment, not while the parent is mad, parents should explain what the tone of the voice is that bothers them and ask them not to use it anymore.

Tell the child they will not be getting anything if they ask in that voice.

"Once you say that, you have to really stick to it," Heins said.

Another suggestion is to tell the whiney child to go to the "whining place" because it hurts the parent's ears. The child can come out when they want to talk in a normal voice. The whining place could be a dining room chair or something similar.

"You can't prevent it 100 percent, but what you can do is prevent it from becoming a frequent behavior," she said. "The quicker they know it's not going to get them what they want, the quicker they'll grow out of it."

Heins said there really is no particular age that a child grows out of the whining stage, but said that if parents really work on not giving in to whining, that horrid sound could go away faster than parents think.

So far, ignoring my daughter's requests in the whiney voice seems to be working. She realizes she isn't getting much payback.

My ears are feeling better already.