This post,
reminded me of when my son got tape stick in his hair. His mother tried to slowly pull it off but he only yelled and screamed. So I stepped in and proceeded to demonstrate that the tape should be quickly pulled off. All I did was to yank him across the room by his hair and he proceeded to yell and scream even louder.
Have your own story of “Great Moments in Parenting”?
I tried to shove my DS out to sea a couple of times when he was younger… Now I’m glad that I wasn’t sucessful… LOL…but he was a difficult child.
But, one of my favorite DD quotes was from when she was about 5 years old. She said “Mother. Look at my toes. My toes are dirty. You should wash my toes. A good mother would wash her children’s toes!”
Oh, I have a million more where that came from, Will Repair. My parents are great, generous, responsible parents, but they definitely had their moments.
When my brother and I were little (me, just a toddler, and this was pre-carseat days), we had a huuuuuuge hill by our house. We also had a VW Bug. We kids really liked that “whoa” feeling we got when we drove over the hill, so my mom decided to up the ante. She floored it going up the hill and, sure enough, we caught air! We also all hit the roof. Fun times.
Another time, when I was about 7, my friend and I were jumping on my bed. I fell off and my little ponytail holder (one of those plastic, multi-sided things) gouged into my head. With blood gushing out onto my shirt, I ran downstairs to show my dad. He decided he better take me to the hospital, but unfortunately, he still had another couple dozen steamed crabs sitting in front of him, waiting to be eaten. He had me sit there and wait for him to finish his lunch before we went to get me stitched up.
I’m sure I’ll be able to think of a dozen more.
When my son was old enough, I started to teach him how to catch a football. He kept stiff-arming it, as small kids tend to do, so I told him to hold his hands low and apart and then “sweep up and hug the ball!”
I stepped back, reminded him to hold his hands low and apart, and threw the ball, which went low and hit my trusting son squarely in the privates. I don’t think he has ever really convinced himself that I didn’t mean it as a setup, and I’m not sure if he has ever asked me to throw a football since.
When I was 9 or so, we were at a family reunion. I was playing some version of kid football with my cousins, when I fell on my shoulder. It really hurt. Really, really hurt. Then it was hard for me to lift my arm up. My mother was not happy with my whining, and told me so several times. I recall once she not very gently assisted me into a blouse wherein I had to raise my arm up to get it into the sleeves.
When we got back home, I didn’t want to go swimming. (My parents had me join a swim club–great choice for a fat, near-sighted, non-athletic kid…) My mother finally said she was going to take me to the doctor, implying I was trying to get out of swimming practise.
The doctor asked how long my collarbone had been broken for, and also remarked “I don’t know how she could have stood the pain.”
Alas, as this was a week or so after the reunion, the bones had already started to heal, albeit a little crookedly. (I still can find the notch where they didn’t quite meet up.)
For years after, all I had to say was “I don’t know how she stood the pain”, and my mother would cringe into a little ball of parental self-loathing. 
It was a great tool for me.
Hee. Same here. My father is very afraid of hospitals and breaks in routine and his plans. He also likes to be able to assess blame for everything so that the universe doesn’t have that whole randomness to it that freaks him out. Anyhoo, we were catching the football back and forth and my fingers got jammed a couple of times. Pop ignores it and finally the next day my mom walks me to the hospital. I get back: “Joke’s on you–they’re both broken!” He did feel bad.
And once my brother tried to help an animal that other kids were torturing and he got bit. Pop? “Why’d you have to and get bit, now I have to stop what I’m doing to take you to the hospital.”
When my daughter was about 11 she mentioned something about how it was difficult for her to see the board in her classroom. I brush it off, reasoning that she is doing well in softball and is making As in class, so she can’t be having a real problem seeing. After a month or so I take her to the optometrist and they do an eye exam. The optometrist comes back out with her and tells me her vision is 20/400. She looks over at my son who is sitting in the waiting room and says “Why don’t we just run him through our free vision screening, OK?” I felt like the worst mother possible.
My son was a late walker. I wasn’t overly concerned and neither was our pediatrician, as he was not yet past the late range of “normal.” I just figured he wasn’t that interested and would walk when he felt like it.
My sister came to visit when he was about 17 months old, when he still hadn’t ever taken a step on his own. She sat down across the room from him and held out her arms and said “Come on! You can do it!” and I’ll be damned if the kid didn’t talk his first halting steps toward HER.
I guess I always thought that sitting there and cheering/goading your kid on was weird – little did I know that’s all the little bugger was waiting for.
Incidentally, this same sister can tell an identical story to ones told above–i.e. her telling her teenage son to “shake off” a football injury, only to find out the next day it was a bona fide fracture. Oops.
My parents’ stellar example of poor parenting happened when I was in 9th grade. I was so tired, not hungry, wanted to sleep all the time, and complained of a sore throat, a hurting stomach, nausea, and headaches. Naturally, I was faking to try to get out of school. :rolleyes: I was berated on a daily basis (for about 3 weeks) about being lazy or a liar until finally my mother was going to “show me” and took me to the doctor. I still remember two things about that visit: The doctor saying “This is one of the worst cases of Mono I’ve seen in several years. She has all the secondary infections now, too. Had she not been complaining about feeling ill? We made need to hospitalize her” and the look on my mother’s face. A week later, I was so weak that my mother had to carry me to the bathroom and cajole/coax me to even drink from a straw. I missed an entire quarter of school that year, lost enough weight to make me look like a skeleton, and had to have a special tutor assigned to me for classes at home.
I’m almost 37, now, and I can still reduce my parents to cringing silence by mentioning it.
As for my own stellar moments, and I’m sure there are several, I’ll leave those for my kids to tell. 
My mom would, on occasion, pull us by the arm when we were being especially bratty or distracted and not going in the direction she intended. Once, while doing this, she hurt my sister’s arm, but didn’t think anything of it - she thought that my sis was just complaining because she got yelled at. Later, when she noticed that my sister was using her other hand to pick up the one that got hurt, she finally figured out something was wrong and took her to my dad (a family doctor). Dad said that Mom had dislocated my sister’s elbow!
Mom did it a couple of more times to my sister, too, and once to me (apparently - I don’t remember it at all). Reportedly she got pretty good at putting elbows back into joint.
In Mom’s defense, she certainly didn’t mean to hurt us, and Dad told her that elbow dislocation is pretty common in thin children (which we were at the time; would that we were so now!).
I took my son to the lake. He had a grand time in the sand and sun with his plastic bucket and small shovel. Later that night, or was it the next morning, you could see on each shoulder a very, very large, largest I’ve ever seen, blister. Luckily they didn’t bother him and his mother agreed to just leave them alone until they went away of their own accord.
On the upside His Natural True Until Teens Blondness was a big hit in Sicily.
True. Mine used to dislocate if you looked at it funny.
:dubious: —>dislocated elbow!
Yep, *real * easy to do. So easy, the doc in the Emergency Room even had a name for it: “nursemaid’s elbow.” We did it to our son while taking a walk after a rain, lifting him over the puddles by both hands. (Run up to the puddle, biiiiig swing over the puddle, feet flying, land safely on the other side. Later, he doesn’t want to use the one hand - it’s “owee”).
Something very similar happened to me, except it was my friends’ parents, and I was sledding. When I told them my shoulder hurt, they called me a baby and said I was setting a bad example for their kids(a few years younder than I was), and made me continue sledding all afternoon.
After we got home from the hospital that evening, I’m pretty sure my mother went over there and bitched them out.
The only potentially funny story I have to add here is the time I sliced open my thumb while carving wood. My stepfather was sitting on the front porch sharpening his own knives.
I walked in. ‘‘Dad, I’m bleeding.’’
stepfather looks at my thumb, then resumed sharpening ‘‘Yup, looks like you cut it pretty good there.’’
‘‘It hurts.’’
‘‘You’d better go into the bathroom and put a bandage on it.’’
‘‘Okay.’’
He hands me the towel he’s been using to wipe his knives.
‘‘Here. Before you go, make sure to wipe the blood off my boot.’’
And I did. I still have the scar. It wasn’t a life-threatening injury or anything. We were both playing a role in a comedic masterpiece and we knew it.
Pretty good story olivesmarch4th.
I was raised Christian Scientist. My byword, even to this day is: Let Nature Take Its Course.
Perhaps not the best philosophy for someone with angina.
What parents did to us was not the intention of this thread; but nonetheless I sympathize. Details unimportant, kid.garbage.inquisitiveness. I cut open an artery. Rushed home. Told by my parents to soak it in hydrogen peroxide. When they finally decided that the opened wrist was a risk, a trip to the hospital, the doctor had not too unkind words for them.
Or was it for me and explains the animosity I’ve always held towards doctors.
…s…
I tripped on a gopher hole and another kids fell on me at age 11. Went home in pain with broken clavicle. Mom came home from the milk store with the 3 younger kids, assessed it as broken, (RN) and made me change to my church shirt before we went to the ER. She didn’t want me to have the dirty t-shirt cut off. I was positive for many years that she didn’t want to take a dirty child into the ER.
There’s a trend here with elbows and collar bones.
I was around age 7 and fell into a garage pit (oil change area) at the neighborhood station, hit some sharp railing on the steps going in with my head and sliced things up pretty well. Head wounds bleed. It’s winter and I have a hooded coat so I put up the hood and pull down to staunch the flow.
My mom is entertaining some neighbor ladies (1950s) when I tell her I’m hurt. Well, I’m a boy, it’s a big world out there, and my friends and I get into everything. Lots of bangs, scrapes and such. Mom says to wait until later and she’ll look at it. I sit in the kitchen with the hood still pulled tight. 45 minutes later, the party breaks up and as the ladies are leaving, one of them asks to see “it”. “Ellen (my mom), you’d better come have a look at this”. My hair is completely soaked in blood; some is running down the back of my neck. Last time I ever waited for boo-boos!
When I was in 5th or 6th grade I got head lice but my mom absolutely refused to believe me when I told her I had bugs in my hair. She just kept saying that kids tend to make a big deal out of nothing and I probably had a bug fall in my hair outside or from a lighting fixture or something. After about a week of this I scratched my head, pulled the bugs out from under my nails, put them in a ziploc bag and took them to her so she could see what I was talking about. That day she went to the store and picked up a box of RID and spent the rest of the day helping me pick bugs out of my hair and spraying down all the furniture with that spray to kill any lice or eggs that were in the house.
A story of walking all over town on a busted knee, not entirely my parents fault, this one, but still topical.
When I was about 7 I fell on the pavement and cut my knee open pretty good; it was gushing quite a lot of blood and I couldn’t straighten my leg properly. I hobbled over to the teacher and she sent me to the school nurse. I hobbled over to the nurse and she sent me home. I hobbled home and my dad brought me (hobbling - my mom had the car that day) to the doctor. The doctor sent me hobbling to the emergency room, where I got several stitches.
I still have a scar there about the size of my thumb. I think the trail of blood has been cleaned up by now, tho.