I would say I’m more social nervous than anxious. I have my anxieties. I could always muster strength to talk to teachers and doctors, any one else about my kids. And, proudly was able to take the information provided like an adult should.
I’m afraid I do not believe this is the norm.
I hope I’m wrong.
Personally, I would never speak to any parent and much less the child about bad behavior.
I’ve never heard of it ending well.
That’s just my thoughts.
(The poster I responded to has edited their post so disregard this)
If I were a teacher who had to write a dozen notes home about some kid who thought he was the class clown, I hope I would keep from SAYING that I disliked the kid, but I sure would THINK it.
Again, who the hell are you to be talking to my kid? You know (and I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you are right) you are a clear thinking person who will speak to the child properly. In the real world that person telling my kid what to do probably isn’t a maniac but they could be. There is an excellent chance they are a fucking moron who I don’t want speaking to my kid and I certainly don’t want them to instruct my kid. Since they didn’t try to talk to me I don’t know if they are a maniac or a moron and I will have a problem with them.
Of course this is assuming we are talking about a stranger not someone I know well who knows my kids well.
Good grief, a neighbor telling a kid nicely to keep it down or to stop screaming isn’t reason to flip out. If the parent is so clueless that they don’t even realize how annoying it is, then I don’t know that I’d even want to talk to them first.
I exaggerated the amount. It was maybe a note or two. D-hall at school. Which he got in trouble for, I assure you.
His sister telling on him.
And regular Parent-teacher conference. Where I was told she didn’t like my kid. That’s all she could say. He had straight As in the class. All his work turned in.
We dealt with it. No blood loss.
I promise you would love him. He’s a character, keeps us all laughing.
I just find the hostility here baffling. It’s like saying, “Who the hell are you to drive behind me? Who the hell are you to knock at my door? Who the hell are you to compliment my hair?”
We live in a society, and these are all 100% normal things to do, and I don’t get the hostility at doing them. I don’t need to be anyone special to talk to your kid. People talk to my kids all the time, and I don’t have paranoid fantasies about how they’re a maniac.
NOT if he were making it harder for me to do my job.
I think many folk (not necessarily you) fail to teach their kids time/place/manner restrictions. Fine for your kid to be the clown on the playground or at home. But in algebra class? There, he’s being an obnoxious jerk.
I’ve encountered a similar attitude. May not be common, but IME certainly not unheard of. Their kids can do no wrong, and you have zero justification to say/ do anything about it. You should just be inconvenienced by an irrational little tyrant/snotty brat.
That is not the impression I am getting it all. Rather it is something akin to territoriality and possessiveness, as if by talking to a child I am presenting a threat to the child. I just don’t feel that my own children are threatened by adults talking to them.
Yes you are a potential threat to the child. You may be blind to it. The potential may be small. But the potential is still there. I’m almost 60 and we were taught to not speak to strangers. But it’s alright for strangers to approach and talk to children?
Take the potential threat away. You think you are telling the kid the right way to do things. That doesn’t mean you are right or that I agree with you. With my kid it’s my decision not yours. I freely give that up to teachers and administrators when they go to school. I don’t give that up to random strangers in the street. Where I’m living now I don’t know my neighbors well but I know them well enough to know I wouldn’t trust them to tell me the sky is blue. I certainly don’t want them telling my kids what to do. Maybe that new couple on the end. They seem nice.
The funny thing about this discussion is I was so hyper aware of how my kids we affecting anyone around them. I taught them at a very early age to not get in anyone’s way and to keep their voices down in public. My daughter is in the service industry and kids me about how tough I was with them in public but now she is hyper aware of obnoxious kids and the parents that let them get away with it. You would have no reason to be upset with my kids.
Does your daughter think it ever appropriate for her - or anyone other than the obnoxious kids’ parents - to say anything to those kids? The obnoxious kids’ parents are either not present or not making the effort you made with your kids. Instead of commenting on obnoxious behavior when it is happening, I’m supposed to make the effort to identify the parents (if not clearly obvious) and figure out when/how to approach them?
Why would it be inappropriate for an adult to tell an uninjured screaming kid, “You are disturbing your neighbors.”? Or when walking down a sidewalk to tell a kid riding a bike on the sidewalk, “You should make way for pedestrians (or at least share the sidewalk.)”? If your kids were violating your self-imposed rules in public (which I guarantee they did at least on occasion), any adults had to just grin and bear it?
Hell - if your kid comes home and says a neighbor told them to quit yelling, you can either tell the kid the neighbor is a crank and ignore them, tell the kid to keep it down - at least around that neighbor, or go out and confront the neighbor.
The obnoxious kids’ parents are either not present or not making the effort you made with your kids. Instead of commenting on obnoxious behavior when it is happening, I’m supposed to make the effort to identify the parents (if not clearly obvious) and figure out when/how to approach them?
I wager your kids were not (often) doing the sorts of behaviors some of us consider problematic. What we are describing are (for lack of a better word) inconsiderate parents raising inconsiderate kids to be inconsiderate adults.
We aren’t taking about strangers, we are talking about the next door neighbor. Someone your screaming child is interacting with every day.
“Are you okay?”
Or
"Excuse me, I’m trying to read and you are talking so loudly that it’s hard for me "
Aren’t threats. I wouldn’t say the first if the parents were present, but i would if a kid was screaming, “MOM, MOM, MOM” to no response. I would say the second even if the parents are there. The child is part of society, and it feels rude and inappropriate to talk about the child to the parent instead of taking directly to the child.
I’m slightly older than you, and i wasn’t taught not to talk to strangers. I was taught not to accept candy from strangers, not to follow strangers, not to accept rides from strangers… To be cautious of strangers. But that’s irrelevant, because the neighbors weren’t strangers.
Here’s that territoriality that I just don’t agree with. If your kid is doing something dangerous (climbing a rickety fence, hoverboarding down the middle of a busy street without a helmet while reading their phone), it’s better for a stranger to correct them than to hope you notice in time. And if my safety concerns are overblown–if you’re fine with your child climbing rickety fences–the harm is minuscule.
I would much rather a stranger overcorrect my child on a safety measure than undercorrect. Worst case, it’s a talk with my kid about how different people have different risk tolerances.
So, safety’s one end of things. Another is annoyance. If my kid is doing something that reasonably annoys a stranger, and the stranger lets them know in a calm, civil tone, where’s the harm? I genuinely don’t see it.
Of course it is, as long as their talk is appropriate. I’m reminded of Mark Twain:
If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat won’t sit on a hot stove again. That cat won’t sit on a cold stove either.
Kids aren’t much smarter than cats, so we teach them a generic rule about strangers; but as parents, we can be smarter than cats.
I’m wondering if we have different hypotheticals in our minds. I’m talking about something like kids screaming angrily at each other in an adjacent yard, and me poking my head out and saying something like, “Hey, that’s really loud, can you quiet down a little?” Is that the sort of thing that would piss you off?
I’m very sensitive to loud noises so I’m extremely sympathetic, having had to deal with similar situations. I really depends on who you are dealing with and you have no way of knowing the outcome. But usually when it goes bad it just results in a cold stare, whatever. Sometimes they really are oblivious and have no way of knowing there is an issue unless you bring it up. I have a 50/50 batting average. Dog barking is a huge problem in my area and a whole topic in itself.
Wow, that is a terrible way to approach it. It comes off as passive-aggressive, insulting and chicken to me. I started out on your corner and you already lost me.
I would say “I’m sorry to bring this up but your children scream a lot and sometimes it makes it really difficult for me to concentrate on my work. I know children can be really loud sometimes, ours can too (white lie, whatever) but if you could just try to tone it down a bit I would really really appreciate it.”
Yeah. You have to be direct. You have to be polite. You have to say why it impacts you. This isn’t about, “your kids are bad”, this is about, “your kids, innocently, are making my life difficult, can we fix that.”
And, the behavior was stopped, as soon as we realized the actual problem.
Her telling me “I just don’t like your child.” Was not what did it.
It served to put us on the defensive.
She could’ve been the professional and refrained from insulting us. Because he was a perfectly lovable kid with no ill intention.
He found the work easy and assumed everyone else did. When it was explained to him he followed our rules and stopped. Not anything she did.
Obviously she was a weak teacher without the ability to control her students in that class and blamed my kid.
I readily acknowledge the challenges of conveying subtleties in MB posts, so I don’t need to get into how wonderful I would or would not think your kid is. My opinion on this matters not at all to anyone. But I’ve had more than one experience in the past where someone was telling me how wonderful their kid was and I just didn’t see it.
I certainly had not come up with any specific phrasing - and, as I think I said repeatedly, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t say anything. I just think the chances of being accused/thought of as the unreasonable cranks - with no change in the kids’ behavior, far outweighs the minimal chances of the kids quieting down. And I’m not really trying to stake out a corner and gather supporters.
My inartfully phrased thought about sound traveling has to do with the specific way our houses are situated. Without getting into the details, sound and voices seem to travel very clearly among backyards. We have long realized that (without trying to) we can hear word-for-word conversations if people are speaking at anything above quiet conversational tones. And we regularly inform our guests of how well they can be heard if they get excited and/or have a couple of libations, and increase their volume.
It is not a big deal. I think at this point, we are just so attuned to those kids’ specific frequencies that as soon as we hear it, it grabs our attention.
But I know that if I were doing something that annoyed my neighbors, that I could easily change, I would rather be told than to think a neighbor is quietly upset about something I am unintentionally doing. I don’t think most people care about that sort of thing.
It may not have any effect on the kids behavior, true, but also it might and I think the way I suggested bringing it up won’t give anyone any ammunition to call you a crank. Or if it does, they are the cranks and eff them.
It boils down to what you are willing to put up with and the egregiousness of their behavior.
Agreed. The same way I would wish my well-being to be respected by my neighbors (within reason) I will go out of my way to respect my neighbors (within reason), including reigning in any nuisance-level noisy behavior from my family.
But if anyone comes at me essentially calling me an idiot, it’ll probably not go over very well either.