If I dropped a brick on your foot for laughs it wouldn’t traumatise you for life. Still make me a jerk though.
Meh, I could see my mother doing that, but I probably would’n’t have fallen for it. (My dad would never have gotten away with it, since he doesn’t eat candy)
One year, we had an “in service” day on April Fools Day, (you know, where the teachers have meetings, so all the kids are off?) Well, when my mother came in that morning to wake me up, she said that the principal had just called to say we had school after all. I started to cry and she said, “APRIL FOOLS!!!” I was more like, “HEY!!! No fair!!!” I wasn’t hurt, traumatized, or anything like that. Just mildly annoyed. (Mostly at the fact that I fell for it!)
Hey I’ll often tried to get my kids to believe me on crazy stuff for a second or so (the 13 year old has just gotten to the point where I can rarely fool her) but my kids reactions were more in the “Get out.” or “You must have a belly ache.” level, then “Really?” until I fessed up with a “gotcha.” This is different. Teasing your kids in fun is fine but it stops as soon as your kid is really getting upset with it. Enjoying geting your child to cry … that’s fucked up man. Like saying that tickling a bit is okay but tickling past the point they cannot breathe is abusive. Sure kids are resiliant but a parent should not be something they have to be resiliant about on purpose.
I’m not bothered by the “parents laughing at their kids’ tears” part. I don’t think that’s jerkish all by itself. A parent that laughs but says, “Oh, baby, Mommy was just fooling. Don’t cry. Let me give you a hug” is far different from one that laughs and says, “Quit that crying. I was just fooling with you. Don’t be a baby.”
The part that does make me cringe is putting the footage out there so everyone can laugh.
I thought it was mean as hell, then some of the reactions of the kids were out of proportion. A couple of real brats needed a good butt paddling, a couple were really sweet, the rest were just cry babies over candy. However they were just kids, and it is a prank I wouldn’t have done to my kids.
I guess I’m one of the few who didn’t think this was so terrible. My parents would have done this although they wouldn’t have posted it in public. It all depends on how long you let it go on. Most of the parents probably came clean pretty quickly.
They will chose your nursing home.
It’d be funny if in about 10 years, Kimmel asks these kids to make videos where they prank their parents. Perhaps call them at work to say they burnt the house down. Or maybe left the car in gear and it drove off a cliff. I’m sure the resulting videos will be awesome and those parents will surely appreciate the humor.
And you turned out just fine! :dubious:
I don’t think that’s anywhere near as bad because even if it wasn’t a prank, all you were losing was the unexpected windfall of one less day at school and one more day at home. This is more like a prank where you tell your kid they don’t get a birthday this year.
I can’t help noticing that no one that thinks this is ok, has answered if it would be okay to do to someone else’s kid? Why? Someone else doing it to your kid? Still okay? Why not? How do you feel about tormenting your pets? Do you? Will you let your children?
If you’re okay with the prank, I am honestly curious to hear your answers.
I think this is a generational difference, though. More and more kids today seem to be fairly comfortable being filmed all the time, even when they’re upset. When we were little, on the first day of school, my mother used to drag out the clunky, 80’s era camcorder, and my sisters and I would all shriek and throw out hands in front of our faces. Today, my nephew films himself talking drivel and posts it on Youtube.
There have been a few viral videos of parents filming their children in absolute hysterical tears, all while laughing. The two that come to mind are a five and seven year old sobbing after the movie “The Life of Timothy Green” and a nine year old girl crying after an episode of “Doctor Who”. In both vids, the parents prompt their upset children from behind the camera with questions about what they just watched, punctuated with fits of laughter. In neither case did the children do what I would have done: run off, or repeatedly tell them to turn off the camera. Watching those vids gave me a weird, not quite right feeling.
The exception is this girl. Crying kids = not funny. Crying kids putting on a Tony worthy performance = Very funny. That kid is awesome.
It doesn’t make send to do it to other kids, because it lacks the “mommy and daddy wouldn’t actually do that, silly” aspect.
And if someone else did it to your child? And if your child torments your pet, is that okay? Why not?
Much more importantly it’s on tape. How many times do you think the parents will play the tape, to friends and family, neighbours, etc?
And everyone will laugh. Again and again!
For how many years will this reappear?
I think if you own that this is okay by you, you kind of forfeit the right to ever again utter the phrase “Some people just shouldn’t be parents!”
Let’s get a hold of ourselves here. All I am saying is that the prank itself would be lightweight in my own family-- and I don’t think it was at all a terrible or abusive way to be raised. We had lots of fun, and all of us have grown into stable, loving, resilient results. People get a little defensive when the implication is that their own childhood was abusive.
If you’re cool with it, why won’t you answer the questions asked then? They are from someone trying to understand why some find this okay.
The questions I asked would help to understand, is there a line?, where is that line?, is it different than how the others who are okay with this, feel?
Is it different if someone else does this to your kid? Still okay? Or not? Why? Is it okay for your kids to torment the dog until it howls and yelps? What about a sibling? Still okay? (Yes I realize kids torment their siblings, but usually parents don’t condone it!)
Well, if the other person was a relative or close friend that the child has a close relationship with, it’s probably be okay. It was my uncles who were the big jokesters in my family.
But it it’s someone who doesn’t or shouldn’t have that level of trust, it doesn’t work. The prank has two parts. The first is “Haha, I ate your candy” and the second is “I’m just kidding, honey, you know I’d never do that to you.” That second part, where trust is reinforced rather than broken, is essential.
Cruelty to animals is obviously not cool. I don’t see how it is relevant. The prank is about trust and critical thinking-- assessing the basic validity of the claim “I ate all your candy,” Animals aren’t capable of that type of thinking. That said, some pretty common games, like “chase the laser pointer that you can’t ever catch” are making light of the animal’s frustration. As long as it doesn’t go to far, I don’t think that is necessarily evil.
As for sibling, I’m an only child, so I don’t really understand how siblings interact as kids. But I assume having another kid is basically accepting that they will torment each other to some degree. I think the current balance of “sibling torment each other when they can, mom and dad try to reign things in when they can” basically works.
Not seeing how’s it okay for you to bring your child to tears for amusement and not okay for his brother to do the same thing?
And I do think tormenting animals is totally relevant. It seems like sending a mixed message when it’s okay for you to do to him, for fun, but it’s not cool when he does it to your dog, or his sister?
I guess I do feel it’s on the level as someone who torments their pets, for shits and giggles, come down to it.
Thanks for being so open though, I do appreciate it.
Jimmy shows there is nothing funnier than making stressed out kids cry. The only thing funnier would be telling Mom and Dad that their kid was in a horrible accident, and the kid is dead.
Now that would be a funny prank. Put the parents reactions on YouTube, and show the best ones on TV.
Now that’s entertainment.
Here is the disconnect between the two camps. Some see that the betrayal of trust would be the eating of the candy; some of us see that the intentionally doing something that makes your child extremely upset (well beyond a good-natured tease) for shits and giggles and to possibly get a clip on TV is the betrayal of trust.
The parallel to pets is apt. My pet trusts me and is loyal to me and would be even if I mistreated it. Your preschooler trusts you and is loyal to you even if you mistreat him/her. It is not okay to abuse that trust for laughs. Even though the trust would persist and the child would survive just fine.
Let me offer a variant of elbows’ hypothetical that includes the trust factor. Your child’s preschool teacher intentionally made your child believe something that (s)he knew would make your child get horribly upset, that (s)he had done something (maybe share a secret with the other kids, destroyed a project the child had been working on to bring home and was very proud of), filmed it, and laughed about how hard your child cried with friends and strangers. Are you okay with it because the teacher later said “you know I’d never do that”? Or would you be unable to rest until that teacher was fired and have to be restrained from doing more?
No, time to learn how to brush someone’s hair in a way that doesn’t hurt. Unless you are saying she just cries because she doesn’t like her hair being brushed.
But you aren’t laughing at the crying. That’s the problem I have here. This prank involves intentionally making the kids cry, and then laughing at the crying.
A prank, as I understand them, is not supposed to be about laughing at the distress of another. It’s about fooling the other person temporarily. That’s why, when a good prank is finished, there’s this element of “ha, ha, you got me.”
But, unless that’s the sort of thing you do in your home all the time, I don’t think that’s going to be your kid’s response. That’s why I pointed out the difference.
A prank that makes your kid cry is a prank that didn’t go as well as it should have. It should not be the goal of the prank.