Nice of you to cut off my apology.
I’d say that most assholes are oblivious to the fact that they’re assholes, too.
When I was a kid we had no car seats or mandatory seatbelts, and I could buy cigarettes for my mom when I was 8. Doesn’t mean it was OK.
I didn’t say screwing with a kid all the time was ok. I was comparing doing it all the time to doing it on rare occassion.
Okay, someone earlier called this bullying, which is ridiculous. It’s a harmless freaking prank, for crying out loud. Letting your kids go 30 seconds thinking their candy had been eaten is hardly bullying. Now whether or not you find it funny, whatever, but acting like it’s some sort of abuse to “troll” your kids for less than a minute about their candy being gone is absurd.
No! You’re a mean old lady and your kids want you to die!
Yeah, kids have a ridiculously low threshold for crying. Let’s put this into perspective shall we?
Reasonsmysoniscrying.com
(It has both genders despite its cite name.
I wasn’t sure how to feel about all this until MOL checked in. Now I feel much better about my opinion that it was both heartless, cruel, and something I would never do or endorse, but ALSO incredibly funny.
I’ll tell you what, I remember the times the adults around me played tricks on me or laughed at me and it was not funny, and I don’t remember it with fondness. I think people who play pranks like this on anyone are cruel, and particularly on children.
And it’s amazing that it bothers the childless ones more than it does the parents.
Having read this thread, I do understand pkbites better.
You keep missing the point. It’s not about whether the kids are going to be permanently damaged or not, it’s the creepiness of parent making very small children cry for no better reason than to amuse strangers.
This just reinforces what I said about the childishness of it.
Well then how about trolling your kids for less than a minute, filming it, and sending the results in to be shown on national TV?
Amazing? More like inaccurate. I see plenty of parents in this thread on the ‘bothered’ side—me, Ms Whatsit, Labrador Deceiver, Chef Troy, The King of Soup… and those are the ones I looked up before I got bored. I see a couple of childless people—MeanOldLady and A Clockwork Melon, off the top of my head—who think it’s no big deal.
Don’t let one or two loudly dissenting parents in this thread make you think that fewer parents care.
Yeah, I was wondering where she got that idea.
Luckily I’m procrastinating cleaning my house and I have the time to set us all straight.
Well, not for the amusement of strangers. Usually it was just for an audience of other family members.
But, of course, I didn’t usually cry, because our family had enough warmth and trust that we knew better than to take an outrageous claim at face value. If presented with the candy prank, I’d probably say “Ha ha very funny. Where did you hide the candy?”
Anyway, the Halloween one is on the mean side. The Christmas one, though, is freaking hilarious and a little preview of reality, where you often are presented with random, uninspiring gifts.
I used the word “bully,” but in reference to a hypothetical person who kept doing this stuff time after time when a kid was clearly not enjoying it.
If you weren’t talking about me, then never mind. I don’t have the energy to scroll back through the previous page to see who else said it, if anyone.
I remember my parents doing two different things:
Whenever one of us brothers caught some goodie, the rest of us would swarm in like the Children’s Lawyer from Tom the Dancing Bug, whining “how come he got X and we didn’t?!” My parents would wait a beat for comedic effect and then say with exasperation “because we love him more than we love you, OK?” That was them respecting us enough to let us in on the joke: “Jesus Christ, they had cake at work today, I brought home a piece and gave it to the first of you kids I saw.”
One Christmas we boys were so hyper that my parents were ready to hang us instead of the tinsel from the tree. My brothers would laugh at the bruises on my butt in the communal bathtub (I’ve never been a fan of corporal punishment or Christmas since then). So suddenly we and all our presents were loaded into the station wagon and driven to the Indian reservation, and we watched as our toys were given to the poor kids. This was supposed to make us good Catholics. Or to shut the fuck up. Same thing, I guess.
Though of course it’s better to be a moderate in all things, if only offered the extremes of righteous parenting or kidding with the kids, I’ll take the latter.
Now now, Colibri, you are rushing to a conclusion. It could very well be that the primary reason was for the parents to amuse themselves by making their very small children cry, with the broadcast only being a supplemental enjoyment for those parents. There are different categories of creepy parents, after all.
To this day, I can definitely remember every single time I cried before age 8 and who was responsible.
I imagine it hasn’t been all that long since you were 8, so this makes sense.
What?