I just saw this on Reddit today and I wanted to share it here.
When you’re a parent, you have to realize that the child you brought into this world is going to be their own person and you’ll have to start getting into things you may not understand and have ZERO interest in.
However, you damn well better act like you are.
I can still remember the feeling as a kid getting Pokemon Red and it being something I loved so much, so I wanted to share that with my mom. I wanted to show her my team, tell her about the gym leaders I took down, and she just took a glance at the Game Boy color and went “mmhhhmm”.
She gave zero shits when I beat Banjo-Kazooie, a game which was INCREDIBLY hard for grade school me and you can make me have war flashbacks if you so much as say “Rusty Bucket Bay”.
My town in Animal Crossing? Catching rare fish? Who cares?
I liked a cartoon series so much that I wrote little stories about it? “No, I don’t want to read it.”
This type of stuff matters to kids so damn much and she’ll never realize how much it hurt our relationship. It might not seem like a big deal she never sat down and watched me play something like Luigi’s Mansion, but that’s how kids try and bond with their parents.
After constantly being shot down they’ll eventually stop talking to you entirely.
My son is into Pokemon, and he’s got the enthusiasm for it that kids do. So while we both enjoy it, he can focus on it a lot longer than I can. And honestly: it’s not that hard to act interested when kids are excited. Nod in the right places, answer honestly when they ask questions (“i don’t know” is totally acceptable) and you go a long way to supporting them.
once we decided to just see how long my nephew could spend telling us about Bey Blades without further prompting. about two hours. it was sorta cool. actually ended up with some neat notions about how you could make a crossover with Homestuck, as I recall.
yeah i remember visiting a friend of my mom’s and her grandkid was over, some 12-13 year old boy, and he wanted to talk about yu-gi-oh cards. i don’t know much about yu-gi-oh but we had a pretty good discussion about which monsters were the coolest in terms of Usefulness In Game vs How Sick It’d Be If They Were Real and later both my mom and the kid’s grandma made sure to tell me that the kid was ‘a little autistic’ and i was a saint for humoring him. poor dude. like, fuck, it’s such a disservice to kids when you won’t take their passions seriously!
and like no one thinks to try and connect what a kids’ interested in with what they themselves are interested so both participants can enjoy the conversation, they just shut the kid down when they’re bored and feel like they’ve taught some Important Social Skill Lesson because they’re the grownup who only cares about appropriate stuff the appropriate amount.
adults spend most of kids’ early years dismissing and mocking them for having interests, then their later years moaning that the kids are uncommunicative, depressed and reclusive. fuck that shit. makes me really mad just thinking about it.
where is my very soft time traveling fic featuring zimbits where they meet their grown-up selves with 2.5 kids via stanley cup magic just so I can read a scene like this:
Shitty (coming downstairs to kitchen for breakfast): oh hey Bob. I didn’t know you were visiting us. Nice flow, when’d you get it? Who’s the cute blonde dad behind you? Also why are there children in the haus– Older Jack (juggling his toddler, who is playing with his hair): …I’m Jack. Shitty: haha okay–(focuses on Jack’s face, spits out coffee)–holy–
who is going to write this so i can read another scene with Older Bitty meeting Younger Jack and telling his husband, “Oh, honey, look at you! Jack, sweetheart, you’re practically a baby! Can you believe I fell in love with this face 15 years ago? Gosh, it’s been so long.” and Younger Jack is just like….oh God Dad Bitty is hot what do i do while Older Jack kind of narrows his eyes at his younger self in a way that’s obviously saying ‘dont even think about touching my husband’ but then he’s like wait, Younger Jack is still technically himself so now he’s just confused
… literally just … hang your clothes out to dry ….. like …. it’s not that much of a hassle ….. it’s cheaper ….. and it’s probably better for most of your clothing anyways??? like I love y’all and I don’t mean to criticize you but …..
I never see anyone talking about how kids can abuse adults though.
Growing up I saw a lot of adult teachers get bullied by students and it sucked. They would purposely push them to their breaking point until they exploded, yelled, cursed, threw desks, and the ones who didn’t have that kind of reaction would just quit or end up fired because the kids would start rumors. One was because our new math teacher was effeminate so the guys thought “obviously this guy is gay and he’s after our dicks” and if he was ever nice to a male student (which… he was nice and friendly with EVERYONE and was the best teacher we’d had that year) they would start whispering behind me, “yo, look at that, did you see that? He’s flirting with his male students, that’s nasty” and so they made trouble for him.
My mother worked at a Discovery Zone type place when I was little and she would come home and break down crying because groups of little boys would call her names, call her stupid her whole shift.
I had friends in childhood who absolutely abused their parents. They were relentless and mean and hacked them into submission and it made for a lot of awkward moments when I would hang with them, because I couldn’t do anything since… they were my abuser too.
Just because you’re a minor doesn’t mean knives you throw are not sharp and won’t hit someone. The fact that so many kids on this site use their age as a weapon, as a way to say “but nothing I do has any impact because I have no social power” is SCARY and we need to try to make people aware of this kind of stuff from a young age because most people who are like that don’t really realize it and they need guidance and rehabilitation so the cycle can stop. Because those people grow up and have kids and do it to their kids and they don’t learn that it’s not normal or okay, that they cannot deny reality by controlling the people around them.
But sometimes it isn’t always that way, some of those parents were so nice and kind and I considered like family, and they just had absolute evil villains for kids.
Check in with yourselves, guys. Especially right now. There’s a lot of upsetting stuff being shoved in our faces all the time and it makes it hard not to get tunnel vision when our emotions get out of control, especially with the pressure to perform by a lot of social circles on tumblr. And if you’re young and a lot of this is new, pace yourself, you’re learning, and you need to be open to the idea of learning more and know that us being adults doesn’t mean we’re just out of touch boring old farts who don’t know anything. We’ve lived things and we have experience and when we say to you that it’s not okay to tell people who like things you do not like to kill themselves, we’re not “apologists”… we’re the survivors too.
yo this is really important
my piano/choir teacher in 6th grade was only around 20-23 whenever she came to our school, and she only stayed for 2 years because all the kids were so awful. one time she told me that me and a few other of my friends were the only ones who hadn’t said a bad word about her the whole time.
in 4th grade, we got an awesome music teacher. he was in his late 20’s at the time, really chill and easygoing (we were in elementary school). some of the kids would just slowly drive him off the edge until one day he ended up throwing pens across the room out of frustration and anger. everybody was either scared of him or laughed at him, and it kinda made it worse. he left 2 years later and teaches a civilized and nice group of kids now.
kids really can abuse adults. I’ve seen it happen a lot and it’s sad and heartbreaking and overall awful to see because so many people brush it off as “kids being kids.”
In 7th grade or so I had the most delightful Maths/Science teacher (the two were taught by the same guy) and he was always super nice. Like he adored teaching, he brought us snacks sometimes and like really wanted us to do well.
By 8th grade he was a changed man. We had young neo-nazis starting shit. We had kids screaming and throwing shit at him. We had knife fights and I’m 90% certain I remember him straight up being forced into a position where he had to wrestle one of my more violent classmates to the floor. My class had actually driven this calm, cool, great guy (he couldn’t’ve been more than 27 at the time) to actually break down crying in class. As far as I heard he was gone by the time I entered grade 9.
Weirdly, I was talking about this with my sister and cousins when we were talking about my old high school the other day. There was this one English teacher (I never had him myself so I forget his name) that EVERY class he had mocked him, yelled and threw things and moved things from his desk and stole and…it was unbelievable. Heard that one or two even attacked him. I never understood what their problem was because he seemed alright to me… Anyway, he left and I don’t blame the poor man. He was just trying to teach and people hurt him so badly, he left. He has ill health as well at the end of it all – so nasty behaviour like that can drive someone to physical problems too. And to those in life and the comments who are saying that kids can’t be abusive because they have no real power or have less emotional understanding, I ask this: If a teenager or child is performing the same abusive action as an adult, why is it not abuse? Why should we brush that off? If we don’t break that cycle, they WILL become abusive adults. The only difference then will be that they have the power they lack in childhood and nobody wants that cruelty. The way they gain emotional understanding is through learning and us teaching them. How will they understand otherwise? They might not know it’s abuse, but it is. I hope people in general can try and be kinder at some point in the future. We have to help each other.
Omg my classmates talked down to my German teacher almost every day in high school, and he was too nice to give them detentions so he just sat and had to take it day in and day out. I also had trouble with some of these students, but at least I could give them a sassy retort back to make them stop bothering me. The teacher had no such luxury.
Homophobic students called one of my teachers “f-ggot”. There was one teacher who broke down crying because of cruel those kids were to her. Then those students laughed at her, for crying. One student stole my 9th grade history teacher’s I-Phone. One student picked up a chair and was about to throw it at my writing teacher.
ppl who think children cannot do horrible shit and that the shit they do is not horrible shit or that they are not responsible for that are the same people who deny children agency when they need it and deny them choices in life as if they are not full humans yet and are adult’s property (parents, caregivers).
Children do have agency and as much as they have it they are also responsible for horrible things they might do. If you do not see it and deny children recognition of their agency it can lead to horrible social results. Obviously a deep crisis of some sort is also needed and so the situation gets to this point but if everything is aligned then you get fucked up society people.
Children are not only passive, they are active. And while there’s a whole issue of consent here as well, I would not comment on that but say that in other areas (non-sexual) of life their activeness and responsibility as well as power of decision making should be recognized for everyone’s sake.
just moving along like everyone else 