If it were up to me I'd never have anything to do with the little shits again

In My Humble Opinion
1

There’s another family that we’ve known for years. Their kids are the same age as mine (13 & 10) and we go to the same temple. We’ve carpooled with each other and gone to movies together. I’m running a D&D campaign that all four kids are playing in. They aren’t my kids’ best friends, but they’ve all gotten along fine for years.

Every year this family has a big camping trip. It’s grown over the years from just them to four families. They knew we liked to camp, so this year they asked us to join the group and we accepted. We were all looking forward to it, particularly my daughter who had previously met another of the girls in the group (besides the girl we’ve known for years) and really hit it off with her.

It went badly. My wife and I had an okay time with the adults, but the interactions between the kids went completely off the rails. Everything seemed fine Friday night, but on Saturday, the other six kids decided that the most fun thing to do was ostracize the two newcomers – my kids. This included making up nasty nicknames for them and excluding them from any games they were playing. Eventually my kids gave up entirely on the group. My daughter spent the rest of the trip playing with some other kids she’d never met before at a neighboring campsite. My son went off exploring in the woods on his own.

Now both of my kids are pretty emotionally resilient and neither was traumatized by the experience (or even very upset) … but WHAT THE HELL!? It’s not even like their “friends” were just going along with the group … they were actually taking the lead in making my kids feel like unwanted outsiders.

On Sunday as we were packing to leave several of the parents came up to say they were sorry about how things went. Well, if you noticed what was happening, why didn’t you intervene to nip this little Lord of the Flies experiment in the bud? If I’d seen either of my kids deliberately teasing and shunning someone, I sure as hell would have hauled them off to the side and told them to cut it out. Of course, the older boy spent half the trip loudly berating his mother (!) because she had forgotten to pack his DS, so maybe they didn’t feel capable of exerting that sort of discipline.

Now I have a problem. After seeing how these kids treated my kids, I really don’t feel like running D&D for them anymore. Life is too short to spend time hanging out with people who treat you like shit … you know? And to tell the truth, they’ve sometimes been little shits during our games. Nothing as outrageous as last weekend, but definitely jerkish and nasty.

So … I told my son that I was thinking of asking them not to play with us anymore. And he said that he didn’t want us to drop them because without their two characters the group won’t be balanced and it won’t be as much fun.

Sigh. I really don’t want to continue doing something nice for these kids when they treated my kids so shabbily. But at the same time I don’t want to muck up something that both my kids enjoy just because I personally can’t stand these two brats.

Any suggestions?

2

My guess is that your kids ‘friends’ were just trying to show off in front of the other people that they always go with. Yeah, the parents should have intervened. But I’m guessing everything will be back to normal at the next D&D meeting. Having said that, I would politely decline the invitation to go camping if you get one next year. “Sorry, we’re going to take a pass, the kids really didn’t enjoy it much last year” and leave it at that. She’ll know what your talking about and to spell it out could be seen as a slam on her parenting. Don’t worry, she’ll infer it just fine…and if she doesn’t it’s not who you want your kids hanging around with unsupervised.

Yeah, so, my vote is to give the D&D meeting another shot, I think it’ll be like nothing happened.

3

I would defer to your son’s wishes in this situation—He sounds like a very mature young man, someone you must be proud of in showing such levelheadedness…

4

There’s no playground rules for adults. If you want to take your ball and go home, you should. I think you will set a good example by showing your kids you don’t have to conform to the group, but that they can control which groups they are a part of.

5

I would suggest talking about it with all of the kids at the next D&D, making it in more general terms, talking about being mean just for mean’s sake and everything, bullying, things like that.

but that’s me

6

I’m sorry, that just does not compute in my world. Why didn’t she loosen his teeth for him? Why the Hell did the father allow that for even one second?

Yeah, I know. Oak is a cranky old caveman, and slapping a smart-mouthed kid for backtalking his mother doesn’t seem to fly in today’s world. Prolly good I do not have kids.

That said, the little snot would not be welcome in my home or my game again, unless he apologized and learned some manners.

Saving the game is easy-peasy. Either turn over the non-returning characters to your kids to run, run them yourself as NPCs, use other NPCs, allow your kids to roll additional characters to flesh out the group, scale down the encounters to accommodate a smaller party, or recruit new players.

7

I vote ending the offenders’ participation in the D&D. My kids are a bit younger but we had a similar situation where parents weren’t curtailing bad/mean behavior and we let it slide (our kids said, “no it’s fine. J### and R### usually play nicely.”) I had misgivings but we kept hanging out and boundaries just kept getting pushed back further and further. Luckily, we found some new kids and families to play with and everyone is so much happier.

There was a very awkward phone call shortly after the parents figured something was amiss.
They: So you don’t seem to want to hang out with us and our kids anymore?
Me: We just didn’t like the way our kids were being treated. Their play would get a bit too rough for our taste and it was getting more wild every time they interacted. All of our kids are getting too big now to be playing like that and we’re worried that someone is going to get hurt. (I omitted all of the mind games being played about who could and couldn’t make rules or decisions in the games.)
They: Great, well now our kids don’t have any good friends.
Me: You could try and get them to play fair and stop the violent and aggressive “playing”.
They: Oh okay, then you’d come over if we did that. How about tomorrow afternoon?
Me: Sorry, I don’t want the experiment for your new play style to be at my children’s expense. Call us in a couple of months when you’ve gotten them under control.

I actually think it was my proudest moment in parenting- I feel bad that I didn’t stick up for my kids earlier.

8

IMHO, it’s up to the kids to determine who they want to play with. You can offer guidance and, of course, put your foot down when the actions are serious (drinking/drugging/violence/etc), but in a situation like that described in the OP… it’s best to let the kids decide and deal with the consequences (one way or another).

9

I agree with this. It’s never to early to learn how to deal with jerks.

The only battle we ever fought for one of our kids was to find and hold the teenage boy who gave our daughter a black eye, until the cops could get there. I don’t know how my husband managed to control his temper, but he did.

10

You mention that these kids act like “little shits” in the activity you supervise.

I am personally of the opinion that adults in supervisory roles have the responsibility to teach kids how to act right. I have no children of my own, but I do volunteer work with children. When I’m running a group, I let the kids know that they are expected to treat others with courtesy and respect, and that if they cannot do so, they will no longer be welcome at the activity. It’s too bad that the parents don’t teach the kids those sorts of values, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enforce them in the activity you run. You’re not obligated to kowtow to these little brats just because their parents do.

More importantly, you will be teaching your kids that they don’t have to be doormats to these brats who can’t behave. It would be unfortunate if they quit and your son got upset, but sometimes it’s better to teach kids about standing up for basic standards of human decency.

Of course, I am an “it takes a village” type.

11

What does your daughter say?

12

I’ve never played D&D before, but since you’re running it, can’t you start messing with the other kids’ characters?

Like, “You’re walking along a corridor. You soil yourself. A goblin grabs you and makes you eat it. It tastes so bad you throw up. Now roll to see if you die from an E. Coli sinus infection!”

13

Good DMs don’t do that.

14

This happens all the time in life. It sounds like your kids handled it far better than you are handling it. People in REAL LIFE are going to treat your kids like this and they have to learn to handle situations like this.

Sounds like they know how. Especially since they are going to be dating soon. Then you’re gonna see some really cruel behaviour of teens and kids toward one and other.

Chalk it up as an experience, and let your kids handle it. No one likes the though to their children, bullied, ignored, harrassed, called names, or treated unfairly. But they are going to have to learn to deal with this.

You know how many temp jobs I’ve had in the last two years when I’ve been treated like that? Tons, you just suck it up, wear it and learn to cope.

15

Markx, I’m an adult living in the real world and if someone treats me like shit I don’t continue spending my free time with them. Why on Earth would you want to teach a child that that’s what they should do? You don’t invite people you hate over to your house to play D&D with you.

16

I’m not a parent but I’ve dealt with a fair number of shits in my day.

Since your kids don’t want to ban them from D&D, I’d suggest letting them come. However, do try to stop any “jerkish & nasty” behavior that you witness in future.

17

Keep the D&D group together. For now. At the next meeting, let the little pukes know, in no uncertain terms, that what they did on the camping trip was unacceptable. Get in their faces. Make them fear, really fear, ever doing anything like that to your kids again. Let them know that you’ll be watching them. Make them squirm.

And when the coddling parents call you up all angry at the fact that you reprimanded their widdle snowflakes, unleash on them for letting it go on in the first place.

18

Good post. “Frenemies” are part of just about every kid’s life, and learning to cope with them** is a valuable life lesson.

Can’t speak for others, but strangely … I have found that people who were “frenemies” at 12 sometimes became very good friends around college age. Seems that some youthful insecurities were getting in the way of the “frenemies’” social development back in the day.

*** excluding acts of violence or illegal behavior. Thinking more of dealing with two-facedness, cliques, needling, and so on.*

19

Not sure I’d go so far as MTC (The times I’ve faced the most social difficulties is when I - appropriately IMO - got in the face of little shits who were acting badly towards my kids.)

But I would talk with my kids before the next session, as well as all of the kids at the next session. I think the OP’s kids need to know the importance of not letting other people treat you like shit. And simply filling out a D&D group is not enough reason to tolerate that IMO.

Even though young kids can and do screw up like the other kids did on the camping trip, if they are worth continuing to associate with they will later acknowledge that what they did was wrong and will credibly show remorse.

20

Doesn’t sound like Hamster King’s kid hates the other D&D kids, though.

Important to recall: Hamster King pointed out in the OP that his kids didn’t sulk and show hurt during the camping trip. Rather, they actively bowed out of the needling. I wonder if HK’s kids even anticipated that kind of “welcome” from the other camping kids, realizing that they were the new ones on the scene?