I disagree on the Barney issue. Yeah, it’s godawful annoying, but the shows I’ve seen don’t really convey much that I can’t teach Aaron on my own. The production values are abysmal, and the kids can’t act. For example, when Aaron needs to learn to cross streets, I can teach him by taking him for walks where we can practice looking both ways for cars, etc. IMO, that’s a hell of a lot better than watching a TV show with empty streets where everything involves a song-and-dance number. He may learn the song, but I doubt he’ll learn to apply it to crossing an actual street.
The gift ban came when I announced my pregnancy and was told by some I know that they would give my child Disney to spite me. “You’ll see you will have to watch every Disney movie ever made and there is nothing you can do about it.” Part of the reason these individuals want to do this is to make me break one of my plans. They find it quite annoying that I do have these personal little boycotts that do not fall by the wayside after a week or two, but are kept for years.
I have 8 nieces and nephews and I have been careful to follow their parents strictures on gifts. Some have no magic in books strictures, one says no power rangers. I find appropriate gifts without violating the expressed wishes of the parents. It is not unusual for parents to have expressed bans on certain types of gifts.
And yes, I don’t like having my nose tweaked by people saying I won’t be able to keep to my words or plans. I got sick of it over 20 years ago and it still pisses me off. In this I am not like most people I know: I have a plan and I carry it out. I tend not to make plans I can’t carry out or commitments I can’t keep. I got this nose tweaking about going to college since 4th grade. I got this nose tweaking about my parents getting back together and me moving to California. I got this nose tweaking about getting married to my now husband when we first met. I got it for years when I announced I would help him through college and then go myself. I was assured by one and all that I would never get my turn. I have five year plans. Named because I am fully aware how difficult it is to plan and exactly how successful the original five year plans were. So far I have missed only one. That was because my husband was attacked, brutally beaten and out of work recooperating for months with no compensation of any kind. The only other long term plan of mine that failed was going to art college. It failed because my mother destroyed my portfolio in a deliberate attempt to keep me out of art school.
Nearly 4 years ago my five year plan was to get pregnant. Not easy with a sterile husband. I managed that one as well.
I still think he was being a jerk, and I do think the pit is the place to say that rather than side track another thread. I will admit that he probably did not mean to hit such a sore point and is not generally a jerk.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by beagledave *
**Well. No.
That’s not what seems to be the problems with lee’s post.
To review, again.
Her reaction to a throwaway comment from Uke was way out of proportion to the original comment by Uke. **[//quote]
You’ll notice, if you re-read my post, that I said as much up front. I agree with posters who have pointed this out. I did not say that this was not a problem with her post. In fact, I didn’t say that your other point wasn’t a problem with her post. I was addressing the fact that so many other posters seemed to think it was unreasonable and somehow over-controlling to make rules for what your children should and shouldn’t be exposed to when they’re small.
Having been in that position–grandparents and whoever else giving gifts they knew we would never have gotten our children because they don’t agree with our values and figure we’ll come to our senses when we realize how wrong we are–I understand lee’s anger and frustration in the matter, and I can understand some hyperbole when addressing the issue, and also understand her sensitivity the to joke–in the wrong circumstances, which these are, it hits right in the middle of things that are really, really infuriating to someone whose choices for raising their children aren’t identical with everyone else’s. That’s not Ukelele Ike’s fault, and lee ought to have stopped to consider that he likely was making an joke and didn’t intend to offend anyone, and I never said otherwise.
I didn’t address this point at all in my post, since that wasn’t my intention. For the record, I agree. A gift is something another person gives you out of their own kindness and generosity, and should be treated as such, no matter what it is. I didn’t address this point at all, since my post wasn’t meant to be entirely a rebuttal or support of her post, but was mainly in reaction to some of the comments of other posters in this thread.
Giving lee as much charity as Ukelele Ike ought to have had, I believe (wrongly or not) that her frustration over the issue led her to overstate her reaction. I know I feel the way she described when it happens to me, and I know that I’m sorely tempted sometimes to lecture my MIL about my feelings about gender roles, and how offensive I find her implication that it would somehow be terrible if my son turned out to be gay, and that I should attempt to prevent this by not letting him play with dolls. Knowing that I do get that angry, but in the end bite my tongue and smile and make sure my children thank anyone who gives them gifts graciously, I assume that she does the same. Perhaps I’m wrong in that, but I’ve found that assuming good motives and the desire to behave well, in the absence of concrete evidence to the contrary, has been helpful in getting along with people, and understanding them, and not flying into a rage when they say something that seems offensive to me at first blush. And I don’t consider a rant on a message board made in the heat of anger to be concrete evidence to the contrary.
It should be pointed out that we have run into people (specifically, one of lee’s coworkers) who, upon hearing about our desire that Disney animation be kept from our household, express the resolve to give us nothing but Disney gifts. Such behaviors is abhorrently rude, and the exposure to it may help to explain lee’s stridency on this matter.
Lee, having goals is commendable. Some are worth fighting tooth and nail for, such as college. To a large degree it will affect your ability to support yourself, your happiness, your self-esteem. So that is a noble and necessary goal and you should try not to deviate from that goal.
Sheltering your child from all things Disney is NOT a noble and necessary goal. It is a relatively innocuous preference that will not affect his/her life in any measurable way.
If your mother indeed destroyed your art portfolio to keep you out of college, I would say that is definitely legitimate grounds to distrust her. Presenting your child with a stuffed PoohBear is NOT legitimate grounds to distrust her.
See the difference? One is profoundly different than the other.
Yeah, but there’s a difference between being “strident” and being an asshole. This definitely wanders into asshole territory.
Look, if someone gives your child a gift you disapprove of, simply say “thank you” and give the gift to a homeless shelter or ask for the gift receipt and exchange it for something you feel to be more appropriate. The more “strident” you become, the less likely your child will be given anything at all, for fear of insulting you. And think of how your child will feel not receiving gifts at all.
My question was never answered: Why did this deserve its own Pit thread? What’s wrong with the “report to a mod” function or a message in the original thread? Something along the lines of “Uke, dude, I’m serious about this. Please don’t mock my child-raising goals.” Methinks someone just wanted to get on a soapbox so she could feel taller than the rest of us.
I would rather have a small number of friends who respect our wishes than a large number who don’t. We have plenty of friends who have agreed to respect our wishes in this matter. The firmer statements of the position have been needed for the family members who aren’t really friends and for the coworkers and other such people whom we could very well do without.
I sincerely doubt that we’ll have any shortage of people willing to give our child gifts that comport with our expressed wishes.
Yes, it IS rude of the co-workers to joke about giving you nothing but Disney gifts considering how passionately and fervently you feel about this subject. It is also rude of you to dictate the terms of the gift you are expecting from them upon the joyous occasion of the birth of your child.
So far, just yours. All the others I’ve seen have seemed reasonable.
What, do you think Disney is subliminally training pre-schoolers for the day that they’ll rise up and slaughter their mothers?
I think that, if someone is a good enough mom, her child won’t develop any matricidal tendencies from waching Fantasia.
shrug
There’s something all parents learn as time goes on: You have to learn to pick your battles. If this one is that important to you, well, more power to you. I have to say, though, that it feels like you have some “control” issues that your child, and maybe the rest of your family, might find disagreeable.
What are you going to do when your kid sees a Disney movie at a friend’s house, and likes it? Or another kid in his class tells everyone how cool his trip to Disneyworld was? Long about then, your young one is going to start to wonder why mommy says Disney is so bad. Are you going to sit him or her down and say, “Mommy doesn’t like Disney because Disney hates all mommies.”? Or will you present a diatribe about maintenance of copyright and timed-release movies? Either way, junior or missy is going to get confused. Or worse–think you’re full of hot air.
Why don’t you latch onto something reasonable–like teaching your offspring about the evil that is Steve Miller. Now, there’s something worth fighting for.
MsRobyn, because we want people to give us meaningful gifts, not act as proxy shoppers.
For Yule this year, we asked our friends who asked for a wishlist (not all did) to give us children’s books that they had liked as children (subject to the “no Disney” rule). We got several books that we would never have considered getting, but which look wonderful. A preplugged list of gifts would never have achieved that result.
Now see, this just bugs me. Would you tell a Hindu parent that her objections to her child eating beef were unreasonable, because it didn’t seem important to you? Would you tell her that it wasn’t worth pursuing because her kids’ friends would be eating hamburgers, and explaining the reason would be difficult? Of course you wouldn’t. You’d say to yourself, “well, I don’t get it, but that’s what she believes.” But since you don’t think Disney is that big of a deal and can’t see how it possibly might be, lee gets lectured about wanting to keep it out of her house.
The “what if s/he sees friends watching Disney” is just another version of “But Mom, everybody else has one!” My mother had a stock answer to that, and I’m sure yours did too. My mother never had any trouble explaining why I didn’t have some of the same things other kids did, and if I had trouble accepting them at the time, as I’ve gotten older I’ve found she was mostly right, and where she wasn’t, it didn’t kill me not to have whatever it was.
Lee deserves to be taken to task for over-reacting to Ukelele Ike’s joke. If she has, indeed, presented her wishes about Disney to her friends and family as an inflexible law (rather than just reacted angrily here on the board) and demanded that certain gifts be given or not given to her children, then she deserves to be criticized for that.
She does not deserve to be told that her values are trivial and ought to be abandoned because no one else agrees with them and it won’t be easy to follow them.
beagledave, yes, it’s a rule. Just as, I’m sure, zev_steinhardt has a rule about his kids (if he has any) not receiving pork sausages or mixed fabrics as gifts, too. Why are his rules acceptable, and not ours?
KellyM, it’s not a question of having a rule, it’s a question of announcing it. People who are close to you will no doubt know your preferences, so you don’t have to announce anything in particular. The problem is people who don’t know you well. As a rule, the more distant the person is from one, the less one may demand of them, explicitly or implicitly. That means a burden for you - the child opens something and you’re stuck saying, “I’m sorry, sweetheart, but you can’t have that.” That’s not pleasant - but with people you don’t know well, that exactly what you must do.
Now, what’s different is if someone who’s close enough to you to know of your preferences intentionally goes against your wishes. That strikes me as malicious, and you’re justified in being annoyed.
If someone is enough of a dick to announce that they intend to give the child gifts they know the parent doesn’t want the child to have, they deserve to have the law laid down.
