Baby girl is sitting in her highchair. Dad is giving his daughter kisses all over her face. Not in a creepy way just in a typical way a loving father would give his daughter affection.
The thing is though, the daughter clearly isn’t in the mood for it. With every kiss, the daughter says: “go away. You’re being annoying.”
But Dad finds his funny and continues to give her kisses.
The mom is laughing as she films the interaction.
Commenters on the video think it’s oh so cute.
That’s it. Look, I’m not trying to imply the dad is a pedo or anything. I just feel like he’s setting a really bad example. He’s basically teaching his daughter that men don’t have to respect her boundaries.
I agree. Insisting on kissing her when she clearly doesn’t want it is wrong. And the fact that the mom is standing by and laughing-- that makes me furious.
This is the kind of thing that later, when she’s older, and dad or some other guy does this, and she keeps saying “no” and pushing them away until she finally snaps and yells at them to stop (or slaps the guy)-- that’s when the guy says, “Hey, calm down! I didn’t mean anything by it. Don’t be so touchy. Geez, what a bitch-- no guy is going to want to be around you,” blahblahblah. Grrr.
This is something I needed to learn for myself, especially with my youngest. CtE has always been affectionate, coming to give me hugs and kisses all the time. BtY, however, has never been demonstrative. And until he was around 10, I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of taking away his autonomy as much as I was, “I’m his mom, he should love me and want to give me hugs.” It took someone pointing it out somewhere else that made me reevaluate myself and how I acted with him. Now (at 14), I try to give him better reminders rather than “Don’t forget to hug Ms XYZ since you’ll never see her again.” Instead, I’ve been trying to remind him to thank whichever teacher/assistant whatever, for being a good teacher for him. I assured him that he doesn’t need to hug if he doesn’t want to, but if he decides that he does, then he can.
It’s tough, sometimes, when you’ve grown up thinking of something as ok (“He’s my kid, he should show affection to me!”; “I know you don’t want to hug Poppy, but you need to give him a hug before you leave.”) Because of growing up that way - and being a demonstrative, affectionate kid myself - I never really thought of it in terms of bodily autonomy. Now that it’s been pointed out to me, I can’t fix the past but I can try to do better going forward.
Yes, I don’t think this is appropriate behavior, but I’d guess a large part of the population thinks it’s perfectly okay. Remember how it used to be that when we were kids we were forced to hug and perhaps even give a quick peck to various relatives? (Or maybe it was just me and my peers, but I feel like it was fairly standard growing up.) Now, people seem to be much more aware of the inappropriateness of this and not allowing the child agency, but I’m reasonably sure plenty of folks still have the notion that it’s their own kid, they don’t mean anything by it, they just want to show them some affection, they’re having fun, etc…
When reading the OP’s account, my mind didn’t immediately jump to it being a “boundaries” issue or an unwanted affection issue, but to it being a “deliberately annoying” issue, the way siblings will sometimes deliberately annoy each other, in a “Mom! He keeps touching me!” kind of way.
For parents to do this to their children, and to keep doing it after being asked to stop, and to video it and publicize the video, just seems horribly childish and exploitative, in a way that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the sexes of the people involved.
This. There was the aunt who was unbearably huggy and kissy who made it into a Mafalda trope:
I doubt this has stopped, but if it has, I’d consider it progress.
This is one of those things that is bad, but not horrific, IMO. Cultural norms are changing in a way to teach children about consent and boundaries from a very young age, and I think that’s an excellent change. But if those norms haven’t caught someone up in the change yet, I’m not gonna freak out at them. This Dad should learn to respect his kids’ boundaries, and he should teach her that her boundaries should be respected; but his failure to do so isn’t a major crime. I put it about on the level of mild spanking, in terms of bad parenting decisions.
What are people commenting on then? Just the description? Kinda hard to have an opinion on what the father is doing if one can’t see the video. Strange.
Yeah, I was going by just the description in the OP.
Now that I’ve seen the video, it doesn’t look quite so bad, and I can see the cuteness factor. But to have an informed opinion, I’d have to know more about the larger context of how these two relate to one another in general, and how the few-seconds interaction shown here fits into that context.
On a totally unrelated note, does anybody else hate these kinds of videos that don’t give you a way to adjust the volume—it’s either full or off?
It sounded like the OP was looking for general opinion that did not require watching an actual video. I thought it was a broader question than that. So yikes indeed.
I thought it looked about as bad as described. The kid was not smiling or laughing. She was glowering at him. Maybe she didn’t like her eating being interrupted, but it still felt controlling to me.
