I think that we can all agree that the answer is a big fat no.
Parents need to lead by example. They both taught that child that it’s okay to interrupt someone.
The least the grandmother could have done is said , excuse me. Before jumping to another topic.
They should not talk over children I agree 100%. But I also feel children should be taught that when this happens they need to be the bigger more mature one in this situation and realize the adult was rude. I run into this all the time with adults interupting other adults. Sometimes I call them on it sometimes I don’t. When they are older I usually don’t. It really is an opportunity for a learning lesson for the child. If we approach issues with too much sensitivity our children will tend to do the same. I don’t like walking on egg shells and would certainly not allow a child to make me feel this way. I still say by age 11 this child should have allready learned this.
I had a nephew who was a brilliant kid who ended up commiting suicide at age 25. Never had a spanking, was always defended by his parents in every situation. Argued with his parents about every decision they made. Was always taught to never put up with anything unfair. The poor kid did not stand a chance in life, he had no tools to deal with reality.
Teaching a child how to handle unfair situations =/= being unfair to the child.
I can’t let that assertion stand unchallenged. Correlation doesn’t equal causation. As a health professional who’s seen a boatload of adolescent and young adult dysfunction and both suicide attempts and successes, I’ve seen kids who were in the above situations, and did fine in life, kids who had the opposite upbringing from what you describe and did kill themselves, and everything in-between. It’s terribly wrong and damaging to suggest to a parent that their child committed suicide because they didn’t raise them right.
Here are the actual factors which have been shown to increase the risk for suicide behavior in children, adolescents, and young adults. These are based on scientific studies, not anecdotes.
And there’s no evidence that being “spoiled” as a child causes any of the above risk factors, either.
I am saddened by the loss of your nephew.
I was one of the children that grew up in a household of “Children should be seen and not heard”. it doesn’t give you any self confidence when you grow up to speak for yourself loud and clear; you have to learn that. I still hate when adults override children like they aren’t really people yet.
Like adults, no. But children certainly deserve to be treated with respect and it’s unfortunate that the grandmother and the mother didn’t see it that way.
You can’t judge a family dynamic by a few sentences. Maybe the kid is undergoing behavioral therapy, and this makes sense in terms of his treatment. Maybe Grandma is terminally ill and any sentence she says may be her last. Maybe Mom is usually awesome, but happens to have been having a spectacularly bad night. You have no idea.
I grew up in a small household (just my mother and myself) and the reality is that I was often left out of conversations at family dinners and the like. What else could be done? My mother has need of adult conversation now and then, and you can’t expect a table full of people to talk at an 11 year old level to keep one person entertained. I got more than enough attention and was never neglected, but I did have to learn that what I had to say wasn’t always interesting to the larger group, and that sometimes I’d have to entertain myself. It’s not a bad skill to know how to do.
I’m torn. On one hand, I am all for children asserting themselves and not allowing themselves to be disrespected. But on the other, I would totally be annoyed hearing a little boy speak to a grown-up the way he did. I guess I don’t think adults and children are on level-footing when it comes to respect, even though the egalitarian in me thinks this is ideal.
They need to learn that they need to be bigger and more mature than their parents? And by the way, who is supposed to teach them this?
Well, I suppose that watching their parents behave badly is one way to learn what bad behavior is. Probably about the worst way, though.
Grandmother was rude. However, it is generally rude to correct other people’s manners. The exception is for people who have a role that requires that correction/instruction? The boy does not have a responsibility to teach his grandmother manners so he was rude also.
I don’t see where. He never taught her anything. He just indicated that he was talking.
I believe human beings deserve respect.
The child in the story was respectful and polite, the adults were not.
I don’t think it’s rude to point out boorish behavior on the part of others. How else will they learn to refrain from such behavior. If someone cuts in front of me in the line at the grocery store am I rude for pointing out that the line forms further back?
No, you can’t. But you can certainly observe what happened and come to the conclusion that grandma was being rude in this instance. It doesn’t mean the kid comes from an abusive unloving home. Just that he was treated poorly at that particular instance.
Then you agree the adult was rude.
Of course the child is going to have to learn that if someone else is rude, you can’t throw a total shit fit over every petty rudeness. But in this case the child did not do that. He acted perfectly appropriately.
Children are not equal to adults; they are, however, due respect appropriate to the circumstance. Interrupting a person for no good reason is flatly rude; the grandmother forgot her manners.
That said, some people, once they get old, just can’t help themselves and you have to learn to live with it. My father would seem, in this regard, to be fantastically, amazingly rude to any outside observer; he interrupts conversations with absolutely no regard whatsoever for what anyone else is saying. The truth is, thugh, that his hearing is way worse than he is willing to admit. He just can’t hear for shit, and for whatever reason he is just inherently clueless about this sort of thing. He is a kind, generous, decent man, and he doesn’t mean to be rude and in most circumstances he’s unfailingly polite, but when it comes to interrupting, he just cannot help himself. You can’t always call him on it; you just kind of have to manage it as best you can. If he interrupts my daughter to talk to me, I’ll acknowledge him, while using body language and prompting my daughter, to say in so many words “I know you want to talk, Dad, but just let me finish with Maddy, she was saying something” in diplomatic, family-understood terms. So we don’t really know if this might have been that sort of situation. We aren’t privy to all the relevant facts.
The the person doing the line cutting older or younger than you? For some people, the answer may make a difference.
Judging by what was posted, and not any speculation that the child is autistic/a jerk/a motormouth; or that grandma is about the have her last breath; or that the adults were having an emotional conversation and they paused to cry when the kid chimed in with “I likes trains!!” I think the adults were being quite rude. I think blaming an 11 year old kid for being rude for saying he was interrupted is hard to swallow. He’s 11, an unless he was raised in the Little Lord Fauntleroy School for Albino Hemophiliacs and had etiquette lessons every morning from the scions of landed gentry, I think an 11 year old shouldn’t be held to such a rigid standard of calling him rude for saying that he was interrupted.
I also think it’s actually funny to say that an 11 year old should be the most mature in the party, consisting of his mother and grandmother. Yeah, that actually made me laugh. In what world are tweens expected to act with grace and humility, and senior citizens are free to interrupt their dining companions?
First of all, Obama could take some lessons from this kid.
Remember that the kid was polite and waited until his elders were finished speaking before he spoke - unlike his grandmother. Parents teach by example. The example he was getting was either that they didn’t want him to speak at all, or that the way to have a conversation is to interrupt, neither of which is a good lesson. In five years the parents are going to wonder why their nice little boy turned so rude.
If he had gone on and on about trains, they could have either moved the conversation to another subject or taught him, gently, that there is a limit to one subject. Kids this age are still learning. One way or another.
Kids learn respect by example. By watching the adults in thier life, being treated with respect, and instructed on how to treat others with respect. It sounds like the kid has been told not to interrupt more than once in the very same manner he spoke to his Grandmother, but when he does it , he’s shot down. Not crucial, but not a good message either.
As a side note and a perpsonal pet peeve. Respect for other people’s property. We constantly get folks bringing thier children in to the music store and the parents seem oblivious of thier kids playing with gear worth hundreds of dollars. You know they don’t want to pay for a $500 mandolin if their 5 year old drops it, so why do you allow them to run around playing on expensive gear. Instruct them to not touch or pick up without asking permission and supervise them and teach them how to be careful while encouraging their natural curiosity and interest.
If I ask them to not touch I always say please and thank you , out of respect for their tiny , pain in the ass, personhood. 
My parents did that to me all the time. I had a strict upbringing. I can’t tell you how many times I heard, “You’re a child, your feelings don’t matter.” “You’re a child, you have no rights.” Kids don’t hear the “you’re a child” part, they just hear, "I have no rights and my feelings don’t matter.‘’ So this is the message I took into various situations where I was abused or taken advantage of. These are not messages that will help a child to succeed in any way.
This kid, for all we know that’s the only time he’s ever heard anything like that or will hear anything like that. I can’t predict what his childhood is like based on this one event. I can only say that a steady diet of this stuff can absolutely damage a child’s psychosocial development. The idea that children do not deserve respect is archaic and barbaric.
Incidentally, I’ve noticed a pretty prominent theme in troubled and at-risk children. One of their top complaints is, “Adults don’t listen to me.”