Being an asshole to the kids teaches them it’s ok to be an asshole, specially when it’s not just “The Idiot Uncle” but a large amount of their grown-ups.
If that’s what you (generic you) want your kids to be, go ahead. It’s not what I want my nephews to be.
That’s kind of what I keep thinking - my parents were far from perfect, but I can’t recall a time when they were mean to me just for the hell of it, and I am not mean to other people just for the hell of it. Well, I try not to be.
My parents pulled that same kind of shit on me. But they’re nearing 80 now. And taking up quite a lot of otherwise useful space.
------> Nursing home. Bitches.
Whose crying now?
Fwiw I do mess with my kids’ heads all the time (and I got it from my folks as a kid too) but always in a safe, playful environment. Never anything like making them think I’ve massively, crushingly betrayed them for a few seconds.
And my two kids have different dispositions such that one of them can “handle” headmessing better than the other, and I adjust to that.
I do think it is one way to help in the critical thinking department, but I also think it should never involve anything truly deep or important, and tbh it’s hard for me to imagine it ever being okay for any kid, not just my own.
I spend many days getting yelled at by people or being treated shitty by people at work. Or sitting on the freeway stuck in traffic. Yesterday, I had to spend two hours on the phone with my doctor’s office, because they didn’t file an insurance claim properly.
When I come home, I want to enjoy myself. If I was dating someone who intentionally tried to make me angry or upset just for giggles, I’d dump them. Unfortunately, when you’re a kid, you’re stuck with the person who’s intentionally trying to make you angry.
And I pretty much never have any idea what I’m talking about.
Tangential note: Someone once thought my user name was a reference to Microsoft. Which… WTF?
But MOL, the problem is that they DIDN’T as you say “telling a kid they you ate their candy before telling them you were just kidding”. They told them they ate all of their candy, then waited, and purposely didn’t tell them the truth until the kids were (in many of the cases) crying hysterically. That’s not even close to the “Why my son is crying” website.
It’s one thing for a kid to get upset (on their Own) about something silly and mundane that pretty much only a kid would get upset about, and something else entirely to SET OUT to get a kid upset to that point. Mean is in the eye of the pranked not the prankER, and it is QUITE obvious, that to the kids in the video, it was absolutely mean to them. Who cares whether pkbites and others on this board “think” it’s mean?
I have to admit though, this has solved a longstanding mystery for me. I’ve always wondered how the parents of those screaming brats one hears out in public can stand the noise themselves. Now I know, it’s amusing to them.
A couple of people have mentioned this sort of prank as a way of teaching critical thinking skills. How does that work exactly? Does it go:
PARENT: Hey Timmy, you know all of that candy you’ve been looking forward to? Whelp, I’ve eaten it all. Ha ha (proceeds to record on crappy cell-phone)
TIMMY (thinking critically): Ah. It appears that my parent is a cock-end. However, I suspect that the act of recording this transaction points to a ruse or subtle game-play which may be used to embarrass me, possibly on YouTube or even television. I shall humour my parent. (Aloud) WAAAAAAAAAAAAH
PARENT: Hey Timmy. It was a joke. Here’s your candy.
TIMMY (thinking critically): It is as I suspected. My parent is indeed a massive cock-end. I shall store this information for future reference and possible retribution once I am fully grown. (Aloud) sniffle.
“For Cool is the Left Hand of Dorkness, and Dorky is the Right Hand of Cool”–Ursula Le Guin, more or less
I would feel like the biggest jerk in the world for making a 4 year old cry because they thought I ate their halloween candy and I don’t know how I would feel if my parents had done that to me because I can tell you straight up, it would never have occurred to them to do something like that. My dad is a therapist with an emphasis on family counseling and would absolutely consider it detrimental to a kid’s development and my mom favors pranks that are funny.
I read all of that in Stewie’s voice from “Family Guy.” 
Doesn’t matter. They’d have Jimmy to suggest it to them. Whether they would actually be dickish enough to do it is a whole separate question.
Yeah, and they would have assumed it was some sort of joke because who would actually do that? Like, if he had said, “Ha ha, everyone send footage in of you slamming your nuts in a car door!”
It’s interesting to compare this prank to Soupy Sales asking children to mail him the green pieces of paper from parents’ pockets. Soupy’s prank was a lot funnier IMO.
You can count me in the camp of not thinking this is a big deal.
So you made a kid cry. Let’s put this in perspective. It’s not like they tried to convince the kids that their parents died a horrible death in a car crash. My takeaway was you got to see how shitty and bratty some of the kids were; and probably deserved to have their candy taken away. Conversely the kids I felt sorry for were the ones that were clearly very sad; but still behaved themselves. I was practically crying for the girl that went to finish her cereal while keeping a stiff upper lip. If I could have reached through the tv and hugged her I would have! The kid that was kicking the dashboard of the car was a spoiled little brat; and is the reason spankings are sometimes needed.
I halfway think it’s fake but either way I think it’s funny. It also speaks to the maturity and character of the child if they don’t get upset over it. I remember one little girl told her mom it was ok in an incredibly sweet way.
Of course. I’d say that the child will have no more lasting damage from it than if you lightly slapped the child across the face, just enough to sting, filmed it, and sent it in.
Yeah, that’s how pranks work. You allow someone to believe something isn’t true, and after they react, you tell them you were joking. So they told their kids they ate their candy, the kids got upset, and then they told them it was a joke. And not all pranks turn out hysterics as results because not everything elicits a reaction. I’m certain there are children whose reaction to the news was nothing more than a pout, but those pranks don’t get uploaded to YouTube or sent to Jimmy Kimmel. The fact that a kid turns into a giant tornado of tears and diapers over it while another kid just kind of sulks before being told it was all a ruse doesn’t say anything about whether the ruse was cruel. I know, I get it, you think telling a kid you ate their candy is cruel. I don’t. If the kid starts crying, whatever, that doesn’t make what I said cruel. It means the kid started crying.
You know, you can think playing pranks on your kid isn’t funny without being this stupid about it.
This thread literally makes me tired. Apparently some folks just don’t see the world the way I do, which is a shame, but I’ll live with it. I don’t trip people or tell them their dog’s dead and laugh at their tears. I do say while pulling into the airport parking lot, “Holy shit, I left our plane tickets at home” “WHAT?!” “No, I’m just fucking with you.” Or I would if anyone actually needed paper airline tickets anymore.
I see a big difference between doing this to a kid and doing it to an adult, though.
Awhile ago I was putting my four-year-old to bed, and I was tired and a bit cranky, and she noticed something lying on the floor near the door to our bedroom. “What’s that?” she asked.
I get a little mean when I’m cranky, so I said, “Huh, I wonder if that’s a wolf’s paw!” I acted kind of scared, and said, “Maybe there’s a wolf behind our door. Let’s be quiet!”
She said, “Daddy, there is not!” She knew I was joking. But her eyes got real big.
“Maybe. Maybe there is.”
Her voice got loud at this point, so I relented. Months later, though, she’s still thinking about the wolf that she knew wasn’t there but that MAYBE was there, because that’s how kids’ minds work, and I feel like a real creep for the joke, and I learned something as a dad: don’t fuck with a kid’s mind for your own fun. It’s not fun for them.
Well, it’s a whole different ballgame if the kid is 4 as opposed to 8-10. Most of the kids I saw (didn’t watch the youtube link, I just happened upon it on Jimmy Kimmel when I was channel surfing). I’m not a big fan of brats being brats at all. And agree that the little boy kicking the dashboard was a BIG brat, but the age of the kids, coupled with the fact that the INTENT was to make them cry, is what gets me, and a lot of people irritated at this.
Yes, because I absolutely meant that as a fact and am not really aware that it’s that people are oblivious and stupid about their screeching kids in public. The point was, I’m not even all that crazy about noisy kids and I felt bad for them.
But a lot of us are like that, as ADULTS. I love your ticket joke, that sort of thing is a standard in my family as well. But unless your intent with the ticket joke is to drag it out long enough to get your flightmate truly outraged and upset, it’s not the same thing, and it’s definitely not the same thing when it’s adult on little kid, as adult on adult, or adult on a kid old enough to pay it back.
I grew up with a dad who was the king of practical jokers. One of his favorites was to grab the electric fence and then say “c’mere! grab my hand”! Or (while offering a jalapeno) “wanna pickle”? So I’m not some wimpy-poo about practical joking, it’s one of our family’s most beloved traditions. We are like one of those families you see on a sitcom that dream and scheme for “paybacks” and some of them get pretty elaborate. But dad didn’t start with any of that until we were old enough to have the “right” (for lack of a better word) to pretty much tell him where to get off.