Dealing with threats of violence by children

In My Humble Opinion
1

Howdy

I haven’t posted around these parts for a while, but I’m in need of advice from a smart, diverse group of people, and the SDMB is the first thing that came to mind!

Yesterday someone wrote on the sidewalk in front of my house, in chalk:

Get out! I will kill you.

There were a couple misspellings and given a bunch of other corroborating evidence and history, I am all but certain that the author of the message is the six year old girl that lives next door to us. The intended recipient is my seven year old daughter.

My wife and I are going to attempt to raise the issue with the girl’s parents. The situation is difficult though. Our relations with them are bad. Actually, we aren’t on speaking terms. The disagreements stem from a long history of their daughter’s violent behavior towards ours.

Around the time she reached age one, frequent biting started. We let this go as much as we could. This isn’t an uncommon problem, and we were friendly with the parents at this time and assumed they would deal with the problem. The problems got worse though, and over the next few years, the biting escalated to hitting, scratching, kicking, hair-pulling etc. We finally decided that we had to swallow hard and tell the parents that we needed this behavior to stop. Looking back on it, I can believe we let it go on as long as we did. It had gone on for probably three years.

That first conversation was the beginning of the end our relationship with them. We were told that we needed to respect their parenting style, and that they felt the incidents were an opportunity for the girls to work on conflict resolution. Things came to a more official ending a couple years later with insults being hurled at us and a door being slammed in our faces.

Over the last year, despite the fact that we’re not speaking with the neighbors, their daughter regularly comes over to ask us if our daughter can play with her. She always leaves disappointed. Am I really going to let this girl into my house, when I have no relationship with her parents?

The few interactions that the girls have had over the past year have gone without without incident though. It’s been pretty easy to avoid the neighbors in Minnesota during wintertime. But now that the weather has been nicer, and the girl has been coming around again, my wife and I had begun to discuss what our next steps might be.

And that brings us to the death threat.

How seriously should we take a threat like this from a six year old? I don’t think I’m seriously concerned about what might happen in the immediate future. What might happen five years from now though scares the shit out of me.

I’m going to try to raise the issue over e-mail with the father. He’s been the more rational of the two. I’m not sure what I’m going to ask for yet. The options that come immediately to mind are:

  1. Don’t let this happen again.
  2. Tell your daughter to not have any contact with mine.
  3. Something more drastic than #2.

Any thoughts? Given this kid’s history, I don’t feel like I can let this go. Given her young age though, I’m not quite sure how far to push the issue.

Thanks for listening and sorry about the length of the soap opera.

2

I’d probably get the police involved just so there’s a paper trail documenting this behavior in case something happens down the road.

3

Also, the police will bring social services onboard. I immediately thought abused kid acting out what happens to them at home when I read this.

4

Six year olds making death threats learned it from somewhere. Take pictures of the evidence if you still can and call the police and child services.

5

Rather than abused, she may just be spoiled.

I wonder if it would be practical to allow the neighbor child to play with your daughter under your (very close) supervision, and then every time there is any escalation from play or argument to violence, you would step in, stop the violence and send the neighbor girl home, with a message like “we don’t allow that kind of behavior here.”

This would be a lot of work. But it would have two potential payoffs: it would avoid further confrontation with the parents, and it might teach the girl a better lesson about society’s norms of behavior than she is getting at home. It also could serve to diffuse her anger at being excluded from playing with your daughter.

I have to wonder, though, that at 6 years old the neighbor girl should be in first grade. Is she getting any socializing influence at school? Or is she being home-schooled?
Roddy

6

It’s entirely possible that the child’s behavior is being reinforced by other children (who may be from their own problematic homes) at school. Also, she may be exposed to violent media of one form or another.

7

I agree with documenting it if you still can (nothing ever happened in the eyes of the law if you can’t provide evidence), and talk with the police, with the expectation that they won’t do anything, but the complaint will be registered in case of escalation.

I’m not sure if there is any point in discussing it with the parents, since they can certainly deny that it was their Precious Angel who did it, and they haven’t shown that they have any interest in reining their daughter in.

I hate the idea of letting the bastards win, but will you consider moving if this crap continues? Writing death threats in chalk on a sidewalk does not sound like the actions of a normal six year old.

8

I dunno. Some kids can be little jerks. It doesn’t sound like the kind of kid I’d want my kids to hang around with, but it doesn’t sound like any reason to get the police involved.

She’s a neighbour and you flat-out refuse to let your daughter play with her because you don’t have a relationship with the parents? That sounds weird. My son has a friend up the street who definitely has issues, but hey, my son knows he’s a jerk at times and deals with it. And we don’t really speak to the parents.

I think you’re overeating. Could Sybil next door have real issues? Maybe. Could she just be one of the jerk kids out there. Probably. Let her come over to play and find out.

9

I’m very sure that the girl is not being abused. At least not at home. She is most definitely spoiled.

We’ve made various attempts at this over the last couple years. Basically, if the girls were going to play together, it would be outside, and we would be watching. It did help kept the incidents down. At age seven though, our daughter wants to play with her friends and hot have us hovering over her. She has plenty of good friends, and has neither the time nor the desire to play with this girl any more. She’ll just view our putting her into that situation as punishment.

Moving has definitely occurred to us. It would be a bitter pill. We had hoped that they would move. Both they and their daughter are largely isolated. We are friends with numerous families on this block. Some of whom have had similar experience with this family. All of the children on the block have had a similar experience as our daughter. One girl was bashed over the head with a plastic baseball bat. We get it the worst though, because we are right next door.

At first, I though involving the police would be an overreaction. Maybe documenting this with them would be best though.

10

Are the two girls actually friends? You said you sent the other girl home because you’re not on good terms with her parents, but I’d think a better reason would be if your daughter doesn’t actually want a relationship with the neighbor girl. Roderick mentioned supervising the two girls playing, and again, I’m just wondering if they’re friends to begin with.

ETA: Saw you answered that already…

11

No, we haven’t (yet) imposed an all out ban on this girl playing with our daughter. We will not let her in our house though, and we have told our daughter that she is not to go in their house. And it’s not just that we don’t have a relationship with her parents…it’s that we have zero faith that they will take any action in our daughter’s interest.

The mother has an inability to have a civil discussion about her daughter’s behavior. The father is calm and fairly rational, but is clueless and in denial. The last conversation I had with him, he told me how hurt they are that we’ve limited their daughter’s access to ours. They’re hurt? That’s when I decided to stop banging my head against the wall.

12

Sounds like the daughter has inherited a personality disorder from her mother.

13

It’s pretty easy. Look around. If nobody’s looking, punch the child in the face. Nobody will believe it, except for its crazy “brought up violent children” parents; and nobody will believe them because they’re crazy “brought up violent children” parents and are likely shouting at people all the time anyway.

14

I agree with the people saying to start documenting this, pictures if possible, and contact police. Death threats scare me. I would be afraid of what might happen x-amount of years from now.
Just curious, since you are neighbors, do the girls attend the same schools? If so, might not be a bad idea to contact the school and see if any bullying is going on there. ( :smiley: Maybe if you can raise enough stink, they will move! Hate to see you have to leave friends when you say they don’t have any.)
Also, just in case, would your daughter would enjoy self-defense classes?

15

It sounds like the mom might be in total denial that her child has some possible mental problems. If the girl is not attending a regular school, and none of the neighbors have complained about her behavior, then someone needs to start. This kind of thing could get worse for everyone involved, and at least social services should look into it.

16

Fortunately, the girls do not attend the same school. Perhaps it is an exaggeration to say that they don’t have any friends. They do maintain some relationships on the block. Predominantly with families that either don’t have kids or whose kids are old enough not to be affected by this. If you never had occasion to discuss their daughter’s behavior with them, you’d think them a perfectly nice couple. I know we used to feel that way.

17

Those of you who suggested calling the police - have you all lost your mind? This child is six. Six year olds do occasionally say things just because they heard them somewhere, or because they think it’ll get a rise out of you (works pretty well, based on this thread), or because they know it’s mean but don’t know exactly what “kill” or “dead” mean.

I think it’s awful that this child’s biting behavior at the age of one or kicking behavior at the age of three has apparently gone on her permanent record. She writes a mean sentence in chalk and she’s down the slippery slope of psychopathy (based on: “What might happen five years from now though scares the shit out of me.”).

I have little kids. I’m around kids all the time. This is a seriously insane overreaction. I’d be willing to bet the other kid’s parents have a very interesting other side to this whole story. Based on the OP’s reaction to this incident, I doubt he was all sunshine and roses while the girl’s mother went batshit.

18

From what Ass For A Hat has posted here, it doesn’t sound like he cut off contact with the little girl next door based on one or two isolated incidents, but based on him not feeling that his child was safe socializing with this girl.

A death threat is a serious thing; as an adult, uttering death threats will get you arrested. Six years old is probably too young to have a full idea of what she’s doing, but she is doing a bad thing, no doubt about it, and I wouldn’t just ignore it. I don’t think it’s time to try to have her arrested or anything, but documenting it is definitely a good idea at this point. Hopefully it will never happen again or escalate; if the little girl is a nutcase, it probably will. I don’t think getting some advice from the police is a bad idea; they’re the experts in crimes, and making death threats is a crime.

19

Ha! Hilarious! Based on that, I guess I should give the local police a call…my kids were playing with two of their friends and the little six year old girl wrote a death threat on a note to the big kids ("Don’t come in this room or we’ll kill you!)! Or, maybe I could call the police on my nearly six year old son who said, “I’ll kill you!” to me at the playground yesterday because I forgot to bring a snack. Or, I could do what sane people do when faced with this sort of imminent danger and say, “Don’t say things like that - it’s not nice.”

20

Ah, yes, the ubiquitous, “Kids will be kids” argument, favoured by parents turning a blind eye to their kid’s misbehaving everywhere. :slight_smile: