This may be the lamest pit thread eer, but its been bugging me all day.
Yesterday I drop my child at day care and I always stay to play a few minutes before I go to work. As she is playing nicely with a set of stacking blocks, another child (let’s call him Damien) races over to grab them from her. His mother says nothing. I stop him and say “Damien, Helenette is playing with these now. In 2 minutes it will be your turn.” So, in about 2 minutes I tell Helenette that it is Damien’s turn and she needs to share. She nicely gives them to him and moves on to something else. I think nothing more of the exchange until today.
We arrive today and Damien and his mother are already there. Mom is sitting at a table holding the stacking blocks while Damien is playing with the cars. Helenette asks the mother “Can I play with those?” Mom yells out to Damien, “Damien, you’re still playing with these, right?” He tears across the room, grabs them, and says, “Mine!” The mother then turns to my daughter and with a smug look of satisfaction says, “Sorry, Helenette, but Damien is still playing with them. You’ll have to wait just like you made Damien wait yesterday.” My daughter says to me, “Mommy, that wasn’t very nice.” and I reply, “You’re right, but we can just find something else to play with.”
I know this seems petty, but I swear the woman had a look on her face like she had stayed up all night planning this, because I had dared to make her child wait for his turn. She didn’t even see that I made my child share with her spawn, and she did so willingly.
I see this happening more and more as a parent. I try to install some level of proper behavior and she constantly sees these other Mommies and Daddies acting like spoiled brats themselves. I mean, you plot over something this petty and with a 3 year old!
Yeah, I know I called the kid “damien” and all, but it really isn’t his fault. He will grow up with a sense of entitlement large enough to sink the Titanic. Again.
Amen to that. I get so sick of parents who try to enlist me in their fights against Teacher X because Teacher X didn’t provide their little sweet-ums with the optimal learning environment every day. Or how they game the system so that their precious can get the “right” fourth grade teacher.
Behaving that way towards a child in pre-school is really beyond the pale.
(hijack)
Thanks for the greeting! Things are going well. Maybe sometime I’ll do an update to my previous thread. It would involve private detectives, lies, other married men, and general insanity. Bottom line, the soon-to-be-ex is more than living up to his end with up to date child support and visitation. He sees the Helenette much more often than the custody agreement makes time for, but I think it is important for him to be around. He has also taken care of things that are no longer his responsibility. Now I am just counting down to the Bar Whores due date in June.
(end hijack)
The Helenette has been getting too many hard lessons early about life being unfair, but she is handling it amazingly well.
And that’s one of the things I fear about becoming a parent - I know my husband and I will do our best to teach them manners and respect for others, but not all parents will teach that to their children. My cousin’s son was the ringbearer in our wedding eight months ago, and he earned the nickname “Holy Terror” - I STILL have people in my husband’s family asking me about “That awful child”. But I blame his parents mainly - I love my cousin and her husband, but they never tell him no. They let him get away with everything, and he knows he’s allowed to get away with anything.
I think there are more good parents out there than bad parents, but the bad ones seem to outshine the good over and over. It sounds like Damien’s mother never learned how to share when she was a kid - what a bitch.
Helen, thanks for the update. And good to see you sounding so well.
As for the situation with your daughter and Damien and Hell-Spawn (Damien’s parent, of course), I think you did the best you could reasonably been able to do. I’m glad that her only reaction was to comment to you about thinking it wasn’t proper how Hell-Spawn behaved. Seems like Helenette is acting more mature than Hell-Spawn.
Ugh, Damien’s mom was stabbing at you through your child. (“How dare she make my child wait! The nerve! Well, I’ll get her!”) How crappy. Any chance the faculty at the daycare would be sympathetic to your veiwpoint?
While just about every other character/animal that appears in Finding Nemo have their own voice, personality, and so on, the seagulls do not. (The only other exception is a school of fish.) All the seagulls go “Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!” all the time for anything. It actually sounds an awful lot like real seagulls and captures the way seagulls act perfectly.
I know this is after the fact, and it’s your situation and all that, but would it be the option to look at Damien’s mother aghast and say, “You’ve got to be kidding me. How is he playing with them when he’s on the other side of the room?”
It doesn’t always work, but I’ve found that the Queens and Kings of the World often crumble when you ask them to justify their actions. Like Maureen’s boss telling her theiving co-worker, “I want you to think about what you just said.”
Oh, and an anecdote: I once bit a kid in nursery school because she had the toy I wanted, but it was done totally in cold blood.
I can’t remember if she even knew I wanted it; I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a case of her grabbing it away from me. But at any rate, my reasoning was, “Hey, if I bite her, she’ll be startled and let go, and I can grab it!” Done and done. But my victory was short-lived. And no, my mom did not back me up on this.
Rilchiam, interesting, anecdote. That’s a sort of reasoning that kids will come up with. Sometimes shocking, but it happens. In this case, however, we don’t have a responsible parent making sure her kid gets the proper punishment for selfish actions. Instead it’s the parent doing the biting.
Oh, FTR, if you want the toy I’m using, here.
