Do you actually not get this? Most healthy adults don’t declare that any child “sucks.” There was a girl in my DS’s class that kept on instigating fights and then would complain about him to the teachers. Teeny tiny little thing but ferocious. I once sort of rolled my eyes about her to another mom and that mom told me a lot about the girls’ family I had not know about. She didn’t move on to the zoned MS and now I worry about her. |
based on everything OP wrote I don’t believe the girl is a “jerk” at all. And I think an adult hoping that a child who is not their own, and about whom they know very little, get “called out hard and often and experience negative consequences” is authoritarian and sadistic and weird. |
You labeled a child "ferocious" and then gossiped about her family life with another mom? Gross. |
Ferocious was actually a compliment in context (like “spitfire.”) The girl was a fighter due to trauma. And the point of my anecdote was that I learned not to judge other kids because you never know the whole story. That was probably the only time I had ever done that and the other mom was a good role model for me. |
I'm not even talking about this girl anymore. Whatever. But, in general, the fact that you completely missed what I was getting at depresses me. I want the rough-around-the-edges kids -- the ones that stick out by upper ES (and most of us have experienced such kids) -- to turn out to not be actual ***holes. How will a child struggling with these negative behaviors grow out of them if there are not negative consequences for them? Like, really, what do you suggest? |
+1 I’ve always wondered how adults turn into the kind of adults who get arrested for targeting their child’s classmates and this depressing thread has given me new insight. People like OP and her defenders dehumanize children they don’t like, and it does not take a lot for them to cross over some very bright and horrifying lines. |
Nobody said that kids should go unchecked. The topic here is deciding that a kid is a “jerk” based on extremely incomplete and biased evidence. Does gossiping and name calling by adults do anything to help children? |
That was the original topic, but it evolved into a depressing discussion in which several suggested that no one can label bad behavior, which is usually the first and necessary step to checking it. |
😳😳😳 What sort of crazy retributionist John Wick fantasy life are you living?? This is some wild stuff. |
Kids are people. They have the same range of good or bad that adults have. Most are fine, some are very good people, some are jerks, a small minority are monsters who kill or rape or torment. Some of that comes from trauma but that's as true of adults. It's not unhealthy to acknowledge that. |
I have never, in many years of parenting (my kids are now older teens and young adults), seen a situation where adults gossiping and name-calling about a child has ever helped either the child targeted by the adults or other children. |
Kids are *children* not little adults. What is wrong with you? Do you think a toddler that grabs a toy is a selfish sociopath? And despite what you think, the vast majority of adults are not going around making judgments about other children like that. If you decide that in your mission to enforce good behavior you need to call out all the 10 year old jerks to other adults, you are going to get the side eye, like OP did. So live you values and accept that other adults will judge you as the jerk in this scenario. |
+1. I wrote the anecdote about the little girl with trauma above. It was natural and probably helpful that the parents were talking to each other and trying to understand what was going in (because it was that era of post-COVID behavioral chaos in school and all the kids were being impacted in one way or another) but gossiping/judgment was not helping anyone. |
A toddler is not a fourth grader and grabbing a toy isn't sociopathy, so obviously I wouldn't say that. That doesn't mean there aren't fourth graders who are monsters. I've known them. A kid, probably around that age, used to take me out into the woods and then throw rocks at me. I still have a scar between my eyes. Once he lured me into his room and repeatedly sodomized me with his fingers. He was the only kid on my block, though, and I didn't have many friends, so we still played together. That's my perspective. I've seen too much of the range of evil that exists in children to pretend like it doesn't exist. |
That literally did not happen |