I have friends who are way too lenient on their kids, basically never disciplining them in any way. I don’t say anything because they never asked, and it never impacts me. But their kid is never coming over for play dates with my daughter, because that’s not behaviour I want to have modelled for her if I can possibly avoid it.
Sorry, I don’t get it - what did this woman do that was so weird?
What I never understand is parents who should know better but somehow don’t. My wife’s BFF is a child psychologist and her husband a neurosurgeon, and they have a 4-year-old who is very much a full-on Masshole already (they live outside of Boston), because they never actually discipline him, they try to reason with him and then just give in when he somehow doesn’t respond to that approach, every single time.
I don’t have kids but even I know, having been around a 4-year-old before for at least 30 seconds, that reason does not and will not ever, ever, ever work on them at that age. I don’t like to hang out with them because someday I’m going to punch the shit out of that little fucker.
One of my best friends is a doctor and his wife is a nurse. They are very successful and own a condo in Miami, a large cottage in Ontario, and 2 big heritage houses in Westmount, Montreal.
Unfortunately, they are terrible at parenting. They have 2 young boys (9 and 11 now) that completely rule the household and it’s chaos. Their house looks like a hoarder is living there. They do whatever they want, whenever they want, and they only eat when and what they want, and are openly defiant. They don’t go to restaurants or take the kids shopping because they are too hard to control. It’s like that Problem Child movie IRL… time two. They’ll look you right in the eye and then push that vase over or dump their plate on the floor, etc… and my friends’ typical reaction would be “Now Stephen… why did you do that?” He says he doesn’t want to discipline them because he wants to be friends and doesn’t want them to harbour ill feelings.
Visiting them is exhausting. Getting them to do or go anywhere is taxing. We actually spent one weekend cleaning their house because we couldn’t stand it anymore.
I’ve told them that they need to rein the boys in because they’re headed for a world of trouble when they hit their teens!
Heh. I used to cut my kids sandwiches into quarters so that they could eat them neatly. I’d cut my own like theirs to be cute. To this day I, my son, and my daughter all cut our sandwiches into quarters. This applies to all sammiches, be they burgers, egg salad, etc. I didn’t even realize it was strange until the first time my gf shared a meal with all of us and she cracked up about our weird habit.
My daughter is ADHD, and on the Autism spectrum. Backing up a minute, there… she’s not my biological kid. I came on the scene when she was 10, she’s almost 19 now. She’s never met her birth father. As far as we’re concerned, she’s my daughter and I’m her dad.
So anyway, back then when I was still the new kid in the household, my wife had a friend, Mary, with a son, also 10 years old, also ADHD. Mary’s philosophy was that her son shouldn’t be punished for anything, because he can’t help it; she would be punishing the ADHD symptoms, not the kid.
Bullshit.
These kids know right from wrong, just like any other kid. And they will try to get away with anything they can, just like any other kid. Mary’s son was a fucking monster, because he knew he could do whatever he pleased and always get away with it.
Fortunately, Wife and Mary’s friendship was on the way out back then, precisely for this reason. I recall we only hung out with them once or twice before that was it.
I have probably been friends with bad parents, but I’m not sure how to tell in most cases. You pretty much need at least 25 years to find out if parents were any good at the job, and how the quality of parenting is perceived along the way can be misleading.
OTOH I certainly do and have known some clearly bad parents, but they’ve never been in the friend category.
One acquaintance decided to home school their daughter to accommodate an astonishing travel plan. It’s not the choice I would have made but my dog and their dog were good friends, so I just rolled with their parenting decisions. Their daughter seemed happy enough.
One of my best friends is way more permissive of roughhousing and minor destruction by her boys than I would be. These are high energy kids who could use a bit more guidance about where and when these exhibitions are appropriate. She and her husband also let their kids be way too picky about food, to the point where they eat very little that isn’t chicken, rice, cheese, or bread. The boys take after their father that way. I will inherit these children with Mrs. Charming and Rested should anything happen to my friends so although we love the boys very much, we also fervently hope their parents take care of themselves.
The way you define ‘bad parents’, specifically de-emphasizing semi-objective things like ‘abuse’ or objective findings like those of govt child service depts etc, could invite an almost entirely elastic definition I think.
The only people who can absolutely say they aren’t ‘bad parents’ themselves in some respect are people without kids. 
A couple we know comes to mind, raised two sons who got into Ivy League schools, lots of parental ‘support’, might also be described as pressure. But both are perhaps a bit strange young men, and neither have so far, in their 30’s now, made a lot of those educations in the terms most people expect. Acquaintances of ours/theirs will sometimes comment on this. Or maybe the common expectation is wrong. Or somebody else thinks those two aren’t a little ‘off’ (maybe the critics are just jealous, maybe we are). Or some other pair of brothers might get the same degrees and go on to huge financial success by their 30’s but somebody else says ‘that’s not what life is about’ and/or ‘those guys have a hole in their souls’ and on and on.
Taking that example because on the surface at least that’s ‘success at parenting’, unless again judging the results is so subjective that…why think any given opinion should matter to anybody else? Most people whose kids we’ve known (known of at least) since our and their kids were little, but now like our kids late 20’s-mid 30’s, which is pretty many, we’ve lived in the same place for a long time, have had lower objective educational achievements at least than the two I mentioned, the kids I mean. At the other end of the spectrum a few ended their educations with HS and have been in jail. I think our own kids are terrific people, and we hear that pretty often from other people. But people also flatter you with stuff they don’t really think, perhaps because they want you to say similar stuff. And everyone has their issues, including our kids. Somebody said you know who’s a ‘bad parent’ but only 25 yrs later. I’m not sure about that either.
I don’t think it makes sense to judge parenting based on how apparently normal their kids turn out. For one thing, lots of people are apparently healthy while being hot messes behind closed doors. And for another, people are resilient and thus are capable of doing OK despite shitty parenting. Still doesn’t take away the fact that they received shitty parenting.
What inspired the thread was a story told in another forum about parents who had kicked out their 20-year-old for dating someone who was three years older. Assuming there is no embellishment or omission to the story, that seems like really shitty parenting to me…falling into the category of “mean but not mean enough to call CPS”). I think if I were friends with these parents, I would find it hard not to at least ask them if they were prepared to permanently damage their relationship with their adult child (and as it turns out, grandchildren) over something so trivial.
I don’t have kids, so I know I am not the best arbiter of “good parenting”. But being a human being with some sense of morality/ethics, I do feel comfortable in my ability to judge certain parenting choices as “shitty” and “not shitty”. You don’t have to be Dr. Spock to be able to recognize a parenting fail.
Sent from my moto x4 using Tapatalk
Older than the parents or the kid?
The kid.
Sent from my moto x4 using Tapatalk
I read that. I don’t think that’s so much a matter of being a bad parent as it is being a bad person. And it’s hard to imagine that this particular hyper-controlling behavior was isolated. I’ve certainly cut people out of my life because they were assholes, and one of the ways I figured it out was that they were assholes to their kids. But they were generally assholes to lots of people.
The worst is a long-term co-worker or family member who drags you into these kinds of conversations and you realize that they take your non-committal grunts as support,and they use that support to validate themselves.
Unfortunately, it isn’t hard for me to imagine.
About a month ago I vacationed with my older sister and a bunch of her friends. She has been friends with these people going back to high school, and they have all spent time with my parents. They had nothing but praise for them which they shared on the trip. “Your parents are just like the Huxtables!” they said.
So they could hardly believe the stories that my sis and I shared about how mean our parents often were behind closed doors. I mean, sure there were plenty of happy times and happy memories. But none of them could imagine that our Claire Huxtable mother had once beaten my sis with a broom handle for the crime of being a “whore” (aka letting a boy be in the house without adult supervision). Or that our “fun” father would knock the shit out of us for looking “stupid” in response to getting yelled at over objectively stupid shit.
My mother has counseled others her entire adult life. Most of the people who seek her advice would never know that it was only recently that she stopped reflexively dismissing expressions of hurt or sadness in her own children. People who aren’t privy to her intensely private side likely assume she is a fount of compassion and empathy and self-control. Only her children know she has a blind spot–one that allows her to inflict harm unintentionally.
Sent from my moto x4 using Tapatalk
I worked with a woman who had two children, freely admitted she had no maternal feelings at all, and willingly gave full custody to their father in the divorce. The kids were each screwed up in their own ways.
Say something? What could I say to a woman who readily admitted she had no feelings for her children, and they were better off with their fathers.
“Have you considered tubal ligation?”
We older pharmacy students were a pretty tight-knit group, and one woman who started out with us (arriving with a 4.0 GPA from a community college) was a 40-ish woman who had 3 kids, all with different fathers: a young-adult son she had when she was about 16 years old who was married with a small child; a teenage daughter who had very severe behavior problems and was living in a group home; and a preschool-aged son who lived with his father in a small town about 75 miles away. I never got a straight answer from her regarding her marital status with this last guy.
Anyway, halfway through our junior year, the daughter was kicked out of her group home for refusing to follow rules and came to live with her mother, which eventually led to the mother dropping out because she just couldn’t juggle this girl and her studies. The daughter, according to her, had Oppositional Defiant Disorder, the first time I had ever heard of it, and she seemed like a normal teenager whenever I encountered her, but then again, obviously I didn’t live with her. This woman blamed the daughter’s issues on her father, who hadn’t seen her in something like 10 years and had a job where the child support was supposed to be garnished from his paychecks but wasn’t (we never got a straight answer about that either).
What caused me, and a lot of other people, to cut her off was when the boy came to spend a weekend with her for the first time in several months. She took him to the ER because he had infected, running sores all over his body, which the ER said resulted from neglect, specifically not bathing or having clean clothes. You guessed it - SHE TOOK HIM BACK TO HIS FATHER AT THE END OF THE WEEKEND. Keep in mind that this was the early 1990s and CPS wasn’t as powerful as it is now. I just had no use for her after that.
(Another woman in our social circle was also married with a young son, and she believed that single men should never have custody under any circumstances, not even widowerhood, and did not believe in post-divorce visitation rights. She believed that if the kids wanted to see him, they could look him up when they became adults. I asked her how she would feel if her son ever chose the wrong woman, or was widowed, and lost his kids for no reason other than being male, and she didn’t have an answer for me. Anyway, this reinforced her views; never mind that this was ONE man, whose ex brought the kid back to him anyway!)
I later worked with a woman who was from this woman’s hometown and knew her slightly, and said that after she left school, she returned to that town and went back to her old store, where she worked as a pharmacy tech. In the late 1990s, a few years after we (would have) graduated, her son disappeared, and his wife met another man a couple years later and divorced him in absentia so she could marry him; IDK if she ever had him declared legally dead, at the very least so she could get Social Security for their son. She believed, and I agreed, that the son was probably murdered and his body hadn’t been found, or he was a John Doe somewhere, and the authorities all felt it was just as well that he was gone.
I did hear some details of her upbringing, and it didn’t surprise me that she was a trainwreck. It’s just tragic that she had to bring children into that life.
Was that shirt in a child’s size?!?!?
In the early 00s, when my nieces were preschoolers, my brother saw child-sized t-shirts at some ordinary department store (Kmart or Target, that kind of thing) that said things like “I’M SEXY.” :eek: We all wondered whose idea it was to make and market those.
20 years before that, I worked with a woman whose husband managed an adult bookstore (and keep in mind that at that time, those were not exactly mainstream enterprises) and she came in one day on her day off with her 3-year-old son. He was wearing a t-shirt with an iron-on (remember those?) that had a picture of a newly hatched chick and the caption “I Just Got Laid.” (Yeesht.)
If she admitted it, it’s no doubt true. And if those kids were better off with the father, then the mother did the right thing.
It’s sad that she didn’t realize she wasn’t meant to be a mother before she had the children. Or perhaps she did know, but she was pressured into having children because that’s what women are supposed to do.
You can’t avoid it. The world is full of people who do things the wrong way, and your daughter might as well learn that.
The better response is that when she notices this, you say “that’s not the way we do things in our house, because …”. You should be able to explain understandably to your daughter why your rules are better. Or consider changing them, if your daughter can convince you they aren’t any better. [Dialogue like this is a good learning situation.]
Oh, and on those play dates: in your house, your rules apply. To everybody. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of examples before their kid learns that. And is probably smart enough to accept it, in your house.
My SIL has 2 girls. 13 year difference in ages. The older girl took all the crap. Was roughly handled and belittled in front of people. Her sister is considered perfect in every way, by her parents. They are young adults now. I prefer the company of the eldest. The younger one is just snotty and judgemental.
The older one may have been the way she is no matter how she was treated. Who knows?