My co-workers, given how I torment them with pictures of our dogs, dread the day we have grandchildren.
It’s simple. Everybody obsesses about one thing or another. But aside from kids, these things are mostly different. The guy that goes OCD over The Matrix isn’t that much of a bother because at least it’s just that one guy.
But when like half the people you know obsess about their kids, it gets really tiresome. It’s not any one person that’s the problem, it’s all of them together.
Furthermore, it’s non-linear. If you have two people out of five that like talking about their kids, they will tend to steer the conversation towards that topic and “outvote” the others. So instead of talking about kids 40% of the time as might be expected, they take up 90% of the conversation. The same thing can happen for other topics but it’s just less common.
Fortunately, most of my friends and coworkers don’t have kids, so it’s not actually that big a deal to me. But there are certain people that when put together that will inevitably talk about their kids. It’s not like that for any other topic that I can think of. The closest one is sports, which some indeed obsess over, but it still doesn’t come close.
Another thing is that children just take up a lot of time and mental energy. So people with kids tend to get a little more boring as their previous interests wither and die. To them, their kids are exciting and new and more than replace their previous interests, but to me it’s just the same old diaper stories that I’ve heard before (not to mention their eternal complaints about lack of sleep or how they never go to the movies any more or whatever).
Obviously I’m not saying that anyone owes me interesting conversation. But I complain when I’m bored and talking about the same thing over and over is boring.
Although I am a man I find it very tiresome to listen to men talk about the woman they met last night and how big their whatever is and how soon they dropped their panties etc…
But do you call yourself the daddy of the dog and your mate the mommy of the dog? That is the kind of thing that grinds on my psyche. Someone who doesn’t no the difference between a human baby and a dog!! Sickos!
Having a young child is like falling in love, getting a second job, taking a massive paycut, acquiring a spectacular case of insomnia, and suddenly being married to basically a different person-- all at once.
So when I meet people with kids the age of mine, my first reaction is “Oh my goodness, that happened to you, too?! Crazy world! Okay, quick, let’s trade tips because this stuff got real, really quickly.”
I try to keep the little one out, or sidelined, in conversations with people who don’t have kids, because I know that they really can’t relate (at least, I couldn’t before I did.) But find me another person with a toddler, and I am going to pump them mercilessly for information, because we don’t get any guidebooks to this stuff. And it gets pretty lonely and isolating having this massive, massive thing in your life that eats up most of your money and free time, and not being able to share the things you used to share with people. Conversations with other parents remind us that we are not alone, even if we are skipping Happy Hour for the Nth time.
Hold up. You were experimenting on them. And you were doing so in a way that carried an undercurrent analogizing their children to your horse. I’m not convinced that you took the right lesson for that experience.
I too get annoyed when folks stealth-brag on their kids. Me, I try to limit stories about kids to funny things, and given what bizarre little freakazoids children are, I recommend the same to others.
So, good: telling folks about the terrifying song your child woke you up with.
Bad: changing your profile picture to your toddler’s first shit in the potty. (that being the day I figured out how to block someone on facebook).
Amen! Preach it sister!
In the sense that a child and a horse are both a topic of conversation, yes, I did. Indeed, the entire premise of this thread is that child-talk is analagous to every other subject of conversation that reflects time/interest, and doesn’t unreasonably overshadow other subjects. I hear you saying that discussing a child is FAR more important than discussing a hobby. Is that what you’re saying?
I didn’t come and squeal “everyone look at my hoof-babeeeeeeee!” It was more like, “Since we’re sharing pictures, I thought I’d bring in pictures of my horse to share, some of you know that’s a hobby of mine.”
And I want to reiterate that I don’t mind talking about/hearing about kids at all, its the “not being allowed a turn on a topic that interests me” that grates, and it is predominantly, in my opinion, a workplace phenomenon. (Unless you have terrible, boring, friends-with-kids, which I don’t.).
Nothing is worse than parents who can’t talk about anything but pricey cures for their kids’ gross diseases.
What you are saying: ‘You have your interests, which is cool, and I have mine. We ought to share equally in the conversation.’
What some may well be hearing: ‘Your kids are equivalent to my horse’.
I’m with LHOD here. I get the sense your co workers were aware of your ‘horseplay’ and called you out on it.
A lot of times the conversion is steered toward the most common topic among the group. Maybe you wanted to talk about horses but nobody else did. That doesn’t make them rude, it just makes you in the minority.
Like some people said, talking about kids is also a very ‘safe’ topic, like discussing the weather or airplane food. Horses are more controversial; what if one of your co workers loves the taste of horse? Showing him that picture would be like puffing on a cigarette around someone trying to quit. You’ll make him hungry, and also guilty since he’ll be worried you might find out he eats horses as a side hobby or something. Then things will get all awkward and weird and you’ll have no idea why.
Point is, don’t show pictures of your horse to co workers. Co workers don’t like it, secret horse eaters don’t like it, and I can only imagine what HR would say :rolleyes:
Neigh.
What about cannibals having to look at all those pictures of plump delicious babies?
“I could just eat him up!” people say, but sometimes you can tell they really mean it. Workplace awkwardness ensues.
Cannibals aren’t a protected class. So employers are free to screen out the baby eaters. Preschools in particular get a hair up their vagina about teachers gnawing on their students.
Horse is eaten by some cultures. Showing them a picture of one is as crass as showing a large diabetic woman a picture of a cake. Thoughtless.
Um…Yeah? But mostly only when talking to the dogs, not when talking about the dogs.
I love to here people talk about the things they are passionate about. There is something honest and open in it, that enthrals me.
Understandably, people are often passionate about not just their children but also parenting and having a family.
But hearing about Janey had three cavities doesn’t do it for me, I need more than that.
I don’t have any kids, but do have pets and volunteer in animal rescue, and I can tell you that this absolutely is how some people hear the message. There are people out there with kneejerk responses to assume your mention of some animal means you place them equal to or even above humans. As if it was a zero-sum game. Um, no, just sharing photos/sharing in the conversation.
The conversation thing that drives me batty are people who always have some new physical ailment to regale you with. Every time you see them it’s something new. I have a friend who I think may die tomorrow given all the ways she’s described to me that she’s falling apart. Heart problems, knee problems, back problems, stomach problems, she falls out of windows (ground floor) and injures her ankle, she falls down and hurts herself, anything she touches seems to injure her in some way. I feel bad for her, and at the same time I’m sick of hearing about it. Last summer we went to an animal rescue event together and after she told me about her injury du jour on the ride up, I then got to listen to it another five times as she told everybody she knew that came to say hi. It’s sort of like a perverse kind of grandstanding.
No. I said you were experimenting on them, which I said because that’s what you called it. Nobody likes to be the subject of an experiment unless they’re getting paid for it. I also said that the way you did it sounded like you were drawing this equivalency.
I’ve got kids, and if there were a time that folks talked about kids, and someone else, with a faint smirk, started talking about their horse, I’d be cheesed off at them. But I have plenty of coworkers without kids, and they talk about their dogs or their boyfriends or their boyfriend’s art show or their fantasy football league or whatever, and it’s totally fine.
In college, I lived with a couple of guys who were computer geeks. Sometimes I’d be hanging out with them and with a mutual friend; she and I weren’t computer geeks. When those guys got too into talking about motherboards and RAM and BIOS settings, sometimes that other friend and I would feel annoyed, so we’d start talking to each other in Spanish. It was a way to tease the geeks and to tell them to talk about something we could all discuss. And it was a little bit obnoxious of us, yeah.
But that’s when fully half the group was excluded from the conversation (which was loud and animated and in our only common room). It’s kind of different when you’re the only one in the group who can’t participate in the conversation. Yeah, they should try to include you; but it’s not appropriate for you to interrupt kid talk time with horse talk time, any more than it’d be appropriate for me to interrupt complaining-about-boyfriends time with cute-story-about-my-daughter time.
This thread reminded of this thread: Are people this insecure?. The one where we talked about that Cracked article that listed the reasons people hate you.
People who are one-note johnnies about anything will always be annoying. But the annoying factor will increase if a speaker is a one-note johnny about something you don’t have. It will increase even more if it’s something you don’t have and you wish you did.
I imagine that people who are dealing with fertility issues or recently lost a child really can’t stand to hear “kiddie talk” for very long. And who could blame them?
I have a coworker who handles “kiddie talk” like a pro. She’s got two girls who she loves to talk about, but she always talks about issues that everyone, not just other parents, could contribute two cents to. Like sibling rivalry or puberty woes or sibling rivalry over puberty woes. I don’t have kids, but I know about sibling rivalry and puberty, so I can relate to what’s she talking about. And then, as we’re wrapping up the conversation, she always apologizes for boring me with “kiddie talk”. It’s not necessary for her to do this (she’s not boring at all), but at least she appreciates that it’s not easy listening to other people’s parenting stories all the time. I never feel like she takes my attention span for granted.
Ain’t nobody here but me and my mythical faint smirk.
I know several women - it’s always women - who go on and on about their nieces and nephews. They’re always childless, so one wonders if it’s not a coping mechanism over bitterness about not having kids of their own.