4 yo DD just called my xmas pancakes disgusting

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OMG, don't listen to these people OP. Never okay to tell someone their food is disgusting. If your daughter did that to any of these posters under any circumstances, they would be posting about you as the mom the next day. Interrupting gifts to eat can be tricky depending on momentum. Still no reason to allow daughter to insult you.

OP here, I know! The only thing I'm getting from this is that my timing was probably off, but I can't imagine that it would ever be okay to tell someone that their food is disgusting! And it would be different if it were a really bad breakfast but my DD had been talking about these Santa pancakes all week! I actually thought she'd be mad that I made them without her (she usually begs to do pancakes together).

Funny thing is I do have a background in childhood development and I never would imagine it being okay for someone to let their child behave this way. I just don't have much of a background in Christmas. I didn't grow up Christian but we probably had 1 or 2 gifts, not the 10+ we give DD bt us and my family.

OP, what your daughter said was not appropriate, but completely understandable. That’s the part you’re not understanding. She reacted to her disappointment with the maturity of a small child because that’s what she is. You, as the adult, easily could have predicted and managed the whole thing better.

I don't know anyone who would interrupt the opening of presents and expect any other reaction from a FOUR-YEAR OLD CHILD. Breakfast comes after gifts in pretty much every normal household in America. Your kid didn't think the pancakes were disgusting, she thought you were being patently stupid for making her stop opening presents and expressed it by saying she hated the pancakes. The fact that you don't get that completely obvious fact belies your supposed background in childhood development. Either that, or you are totally bereft of common sense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The problem, as I see it, isn't so much that OP punished her child's misbehavior as that OP set her up for that misbehavior by hitting all kinds of 4-year-old trigger points and then punished her for doing exactly the thing that anyone with the vaguest understanding of 4-year-olds would have expected as a result. OP couldn't self-regulate enough to keep from setting her up, but the 4-year-old is supposed to self-regulate enough to not respond? That's a little backwards.

Exactly. Anyone with an ounce of common sense would have seen this coming from a mile away. OP set up her kid to fail, and then punished her for failing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s so weird to me that everyone thugs it’s unreasonable to take a break in opening presents. Our rule is generally that we do Santa presents and stockings, then break for breakfast, then wrapped presents. Do you all really do all the presents before breakfast? My kids would be spiraling out from low blood sugar.

I get up before the kids, have breakfast 90% ready before they come down, we open all of the gifts, and then when they're done I spend five more minutes getting breakfast ready. It's worked well for us for a dozen years now.

The point isn't that it's not reasonable to eat mid-presents. My husband's family opens stockings and Santa gifts, eats, then opens the rest of the gifts, too. But that's the tradition, they do it the same way every year, and there's kind of a natural break that the kid can see coming. No one I know randomly stops presents for breakfast like the OP did.

And we always had food out to snack on while opening gifts, plus a breakfast strata baking in the oven while we opened them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Hah. OP here, and I was NOT sock puppeting. I'm also not fat (unless you think being pregnant counts). And I'm hardly abusive or manipulative to my DD. I did wait all morning to eat, we don't often get to have meals together and I think of holidays as a time to do that. I truly didn't realize that that isn't common for Christmas. And I really don't care what any of you say, DD was totally in the wrong for calling the breakfast disgusting. And santa pancakes are just mini pancakes with whip cream and strawberries and powdered sugar on them. She had that and fruit on her plate, hardly anything difficult to down quickly. But definitely messy enough to keep in the kitchen. DH also supported me in getting her into the kitchen to eat.

And those of you saying I could have waited five minutes, DD was opening each present and wanting to take them out of the box to play with them. It would have taken hours! And you can happily ask Jeff if I'm sockpuppetting. I'm appalled by the number of parents who are okay with their children speaking like that. Four year olds know better. Sure, next year I may make breakfast more "mobile" but my not doing taht this year does not make me horrid. Those of you piling on should be ashamed of yourselves.

Oh, bite me. No one thinks it's okay for kids to speak like that. What they think is that you set up a bad situation that was guaranteed to elicit poor behavior from your kid, sent her to her room when that was not remotely necessary (on Christmas morning, of all days), and now you're defensive as hell, which tells me that you are nightmare most of the time anyway. Your daughter was wrong to call your pancakes disgusting. She's four. What's your excuse?

[Anonymous]

Jeez. I get that DCUM is a cesspool that loves to lambast people, but this thread is massively harsh on OP. Yes, it was probably unreasonable to expect a 4 year old to stop opening Christmas presents to eat some food, but it's also unacceptable for a kid to call food her parents made for her "disgusting."

Saying OP's expectations were too high for her kid is fine. Calling her an idiot and saying she ruined her kid's Christmas is totally uncalled for.