Kids seem to be just as happy with lousy candy as with good candy. It’s usually quantity over quality, for kids. If you offer a kid a 2 pound bag of M&Ms as opposed to two squares of Godiva dark chocolate, the kid will probably take the two pounds of mediocre chocolate. Me, I prefer to have the two squares of really good chocolate.
And yes, I can go and buy exactly the kind of candy I want to. When I was growing up, my parents rarely allowed us to buy candy, and we were rarely given candy.
As for making one kid give his sib part of his haul because Sissy inhaled hers too quickly…Sissy learned to gobble up her candy, and Bubba learned that his parents would encourage this behavior in her, and expect him to enable her. And no, it wasn’t fair at all.
Oh, it was all moral instruction to better them, why didn’t you say so in the first place? Like nuns and rulers, man…people just don’t understand how the world works, am I right?
You get over that quick in my family. My mom is the greatest box re-user of all time. It got to be funny after a while–wondering who would get the Lego box holding corduroy pants from Sears this year. (Mind you, the first time around that box did have Lego in it, so you could never be really certain.)
Meh, different families are different. My family is a bunch of jokesters, and a prank like this would be par for the course. We have a lot of fun together, and our kids grow up pretty resilient.
This thread honestly makes me wonder if the people saying it’s no big deal remember being a kid. There’s the candy aspect (there is not “it’s just candy” for children, as you point out), but there’s also the control aspect. Kids don’t truly own much or get to be in charge of much in their lives–they get to make decisions but those decisions generally mean picking one from a pretty limited set of options.
But Halloween candy…OMG, that’s yours and you can do pretty much anything you want with it. You can suck it all down in a week, or dole it out so slow it goes stale and you have to throw the leftovers away to make room for the next haul. You can make any kind of trades with your friends and siblings you want. You can eat the chocolate bars first or last or in the middle. It’s the Holy Grail of childhood, the golden intersection of sugar and power. Having that stripped away, and by the people who are supposed to be looking out for you…well, that would fucking suck.
If, as an adult, someone you loved and trusted stole something of yours, something that carried extra meaning, you’d be hurt and upset and angry. And if it turned out to be a joke, because they thought it was hi-larious that you got so worked up about it, you’d think they were a total shitstain on the underpants of humanity.
Exactly. And when you gobbled it down in a week and had no more, you learned another lesson about actions and consequences (well, most of us did, who didn’t have parents who would enable us).
I would also think that they didn’t know me at all, if they thought I would think a mean joke was funny. They would be welcome to not get to know me any better - people who think meanness is funny should stick to their own kind and leave the rest of us out of it.
One hopes that if your family noticed that one participant was not enjoying all the wacky pranx and in fact seemed hurt/upset/confused by it, you would knock that shit off, because doing otherwise is being a mean bully, not a fun prankster.
He’s probably the kind if guy who pats waitresses on the ass and thinks they know he “doesn’t mean anything by it.”
[QUOTE= Crazy Cat Lady]
It’s the Holy Grail of childhood, the golden intersection of sugar and power.
[/QUOTE]
OMG, “golden intersection of sugar and power” is fantastic. And so true.
I do joke around with my kids, but it’s more, “OK, so I ordered the Brussels Sprout pizza” and having them fake-gag, or else pretending to take their full bag of Halloween candy while they’re right there watching me and can laugh and tell, “No, mama! That’s mine!” Because they’re in on the joke, rather than them thinking that I did something cruel behind their backs.
This whole thread makes me think of Deep Thoughts from Saturday night live.
[QUOTE=Jack Handy]
One thing kids like is to be tricked. For instance, I was going to take my little nephew to Disneyland, but instead I drove him to an old burned-out warehouse. “Oh, no,” I said, “Disneyland burned down.” He cried and cried, but I think that deep down he thought it was a pretty good joke. I started to drive over to the real Disneyland, but it was getting pretty late.
[/QUOTE]
It’s cruel and heartless and I’d never play a trick on a kid as the parents are doing but deep down it is pretty funny.
I’m undoubtedly soft, but I dislike the videos of the angry children as much as I disliked the others: I don’t think the kids who yelled were enjoying themselves any more than the kids who cried. In fact, I’d bet they were having a very similar emotional experience. And in both cases, their childish reactions are something that they may well be ashamed of someday. How nice for them to know that they were broadcast to millions, with the connivance of their parents. Humiliation is a really powerful force sometimes. I think the worst thing that happened to these kids wasn’t the trick about the treats.
Ok, I stand corrected and I apologize for implying that you are lecherous in addition to being mean. No, seriously—I apologize for the assgrab comment but I don’t consider myself a wiener for not finding it funny to pretend to steal from children one of the things they look forward to all year long.
Most wieners are oblivious that they’re wieners. They should make a Sixth Sense style movie about it.
Teasing a kid once or twice a year on April Fools Day and Halloween isn’t being mean or going to hurt them. When I was a kid back in the early 60’s adults fucked with our heads all the time. And we didn’t have the wuss squad whining about it.
