Nice parents with bad kids

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Gentle parenting is a joke. Ineffective.

This. I know a few very nice parents who simply don't ever tell their kids "no" and as a result the kids are terrors.

I have watched this girl claw at her parents, screaming and hitting them and the parents just get hit and gently tell her to stop. Clearly it is not working.

Both parents are very calm, gentle voice type people.

[Anonymous]

Anyone with 2+ kids can tell you that it is not all parenting and you absolutely cannot assume that a badly behaved kid = a bad/checked out parent.

[Anonymous]

I wouldn't say the kids are bad, they are just feral, having not been taught how to behave and aren't expected to behave.

[Anonymous]

IME a lot of those kids are the nicest by MS and Hs. They often have adhd or anxiety making them act out and once that is recognized and managed by caring parents they turn into compassionate nice kids.

OTOH, some of the nicest preschoolers turn into terrors in MS or HS because those are the kids that are put an high priority on acting in compliance with expectations. When they are little, those are adult expectations so they are nicely behaved, but when they are teens, that is teen expectations so they can become very into policing what /who is cool or popular and can be very susceptible to peer pressure but good at hiding that from adults. Not all of them but I have definitely seen that happen with some of the kids I was most impressed by in preschool and K.

[Anonymous]

I'm a child therapist. You would be absolutely shocked at the lack of parenting going on in "normal" "nice" families. People come to me because their kids are out of control and they want me to fix their kids, but haven't tried a single thing. Zero boundaries, discipline or consequences. We're doomed, honestly. And I'm a millennial not some crotchety old lady saying get off my lawn.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Could be special needs -- some kids really are harder than others. People with easy kids never believe this but people with tough kids know it whether their kids are well behaved or not.

Also there's a difference between being a nice person generally and being a good parent. Parenting requires self-control, patience, love/affection towards your kids, problem solving... but I don't know that being nice is an asset. It could actually be a problem if the niceness takes the form of people-pleasing. If you people please your kids, they won't learn to behave. You have to be able to set limits and you need to be comfortable with your kids being upset with you without taking it personally. That's different than just being nice -- it's an internal strength of character that might be harder to recognize as an outsider.

+1,000.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You don’t know. No one knows. You don’t know what medical, psychiatric or other factors are at play. You don’t know how they parent when you aren’t there.

Exactly. It could be ineffective parenting, rampant ADHD, etc. Maybe they're doing a great job and the kids would be worse with different parenting.

I don't judge... but I reserve the right not to socialize with people who stress me out or exhaust me. And that includes out of control children.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Special needs either you don’t know about or they don’t.

This excuse is getting stale. Find a new one.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm a child therapist. You would be absolutely shocked at the lack of parenting going on in "normal" "nice" families. People come to me because their kids are out of control and they want me to fix their kids, but haven't tried a single thing. Zero boundaries, discipline or consequences. We're doomed, honestly. And I'm a millennial not some crotchety old lady saying get off my lawn.

Same, gentle parenting, checked out parenting, screen addicted parents, and outsourcing patenting has created a huge mess.

[Anonymous]

I feel like once you get to know the parents and see them in action, you get the gist. I have a friend with a terror of a child, but it’s pretty clear to me she has special needs of some kind, and the parents are doing the best they can. I have another friend - both kids are terrors and it’s pretty clear they’ve taken “gentle parenting” to mean “kids run the show with no consequences” - it’s honestly on the parents.

Ironically, the mom in the latter family seems big on the “bad influences” school of thought (oh, she learned that at daycare, oh he learned that from the bigger kids at school, oh she’s always watching big brother and so now she hits too) and… doesn’t see that her kids are The Problem.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm a child therapist. You would be absolutely shocked at the lack of parenting going on in "normal" "nice" families. People come to me because their kids are out of control and they want me to fix their kids, but haven't tried a single thing. Zero boundaries, discipline or consequences. We're doomed, honestly. And I'm a millennial not some crotchety old lady saying get off my lawn.

My background is behavior science. Unfortunately, people who never studied behavior science in-depth latched onto the concept of positive reinforcement, which then became "ignore the bad and reward the good". Which is not at ALL how behavior actually works. Same thing happened with dog training, and now 20 years later positive reinforcement trainers are admitting it hasn't worked well for them.

Doesn't mean we go around punishing or beating kids. There are still ways to teach children how to behave that don't include punishment. But ignoring a behavior tends to make it escalate.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have several kids. It shocks me how strong genetics is. One of our kids is super difficult and we have parented very similarly. I think it's more complex than just saying "the parents are out to lunch".

+1

Same.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:IME a lot of those kids are the nicest by MS and Hs. They often have adhd or anxiety making them act out and once that is recognized and managed by caring parents they turn into compassionate nice kids.

OTOH, some of the nicest preschoolers turn into terrors in MS or HS because those are the kids that are put an high priority on acting in compliance with expectations. When they are little, those are adult expectations so they are nicely behaved, but when they are teens, that is teen expectations so they can become very into policing what /who is cool or popular and can be very susceptible to peer pressure but good at hiding that from adults. Not all of them but I have definitely seen that happen with some of the kids I was most impressed by in preschool and K.

+1

I have three teens and there is a lot of truth to this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Could be special needs -- some kids really are harder than others. People with easy kids never believe this but people with tough kids know it whether their kids are well behaved or not.

Also there's a difference between being a nice person generally and being a good parent. Parenting requires self-control, patience, love/affection towards your kids, problem solving... but I don't know that being nice is an asset. It could actually be a problem if the niceness takes the form of people-pleasing. If you people please your kids, they won't learn to behave. You have to be able to set limits and you need to be comfortable with your kids being upset with you without taking it personally. That's different than just being nice -- it's an internal strength of character that might be harder to recognize as an outsider.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Gentle parenting is a joke. Ineffective.

This. I know a few very nice parents who simply don't ever tell their kids "no" and as a result the kids are terrors.

I have watched this girl claw at her parents, screaming and hitting them and the parents just get hit and gently tell her to stop. Clearly it is not working.

Both parents are very calm, gentle voice type people.

How old is the child?