I remember one time when I was in 2nd grade and a classmate and I both had sharpened our pencils. We went up to a boy and one kid got on one side and I got on the other and held them near his face.
“Hey Matt!” one said and he looked that way, saw the pencil hovering near his face and jerked away, only to bump his cheek into my penciltip. No harm, just a small mark on his cheek.
The teacher took me aside and covered my eye and said “You could have poked his eye out. How would you like to go around like this for the rest of your life?”
I mumbled something about how I didn’t mean it and was sorry. But I was 8 years old and really what I was thinking was “holy cow! That’s awesome. I could have an eyepatch and be a pirate!”
Because, you know, I was 8.
A part of me still thinks it’s cool today. Yet, I still consider myself fairly normal and well-adjusted. Oh and I’ve pretty much completely kicked the habit of randomly stabbing people in the eyeballs with sharp objects.
ISTM that if you limit your children’s friendship’s to only the normal ones, your kids won’t have a lot of friends. Kids are weird, and they become socialized at different rates. Then they hit puberty, and it all goes out the window.
I would also say this is typical eight-year-old behavior. Kids frequently say stupid things like this to test boundaries. Kid 2 probably already knows that a car getting a flat tire is not funny, but saying that it would be funny is a way to gauge an adult’s reaction to the situation. He’s exploring social norms by saying something subversive.
As Bart Simpson said, “No, it wouldn’t be funny, but if we were watching it on TV it would be funny.”
Of course to a kid it’s funny. This is a normal thing. Even if the kid you yelled at got mad and put nails under your tire, which he just might, it’d be perfectly normal for a kid to do.
Problem solved. I think you’re being reasonable, Bricker.
This is really about Bricker Jr. I think it would be unfair to him to not allow him to develop more of a friendship with this kid if he wants to, based solely on this incident. And this kid is probably tame compared to some of the kids he’ll end up hanging out with.
If Bricker Jr. mentions having one-on-one time with him, I think you should. Just keep a close eye on the kid if he’s over. If he never brings it up though, you don’t have to either. It’s fine for him to only be friends in class.
I would have been a bit annoyed myself by the kid’s response, but he’s 8, and he sounds typical for the 8-year-old’s I know. Most don’t have much sense about this sort of thing by this age. Or, they might, but they aren’t expressing it all the time or appropriately. Hell, plenty of guys in their 20s and older do the same shit and would have the same response to you and your son’s efforts to instruct them in good citizenship.
Bricker, I agree with your initial gut reaction to the kid’s action, but I also think your decision was the right call. At issue here is that this is way to small a sample to get a definite opionion on this kid. Friendships are harder to come by for kids today in these highly organised and rigidly scheduled lives they have, so chances to develop one should not be thrown away. Having the kid over at your house will let you develop a better sense of where he stands. You can adjust accordingly.
And remember, parenting is like driving:
In driving, everyone who drives slower than you thinks you’re a maniac. In parenting, everyone who’s a more hands on parent will think you’re a slaker parent breeding future criminals.
In driving, everyone who goes faster than you thinks you’re an “old woman”. Every parent who’s more hands off thinks you’re a helicopter parent.
Recently at work we had the pleasure of the company of a youth ministry- approximately 30 kids and their 10 adult chaperons. They did a lot of… well, technically landscaping/minor construction work, but that’s being generous. The following conversation, which took place when I had the honor of experiencing their construction skills in my area of the campus, seriously tested my ability to think before speaking. I work outside, for those who don’t know, and there are a lot of bugs. I endured a TON of screeching and swatting and other hysterics before we got to:
Girl: OMG. A grand-daddy longlegs! Ewwwww! Kill it!
Girl2: No, you catch it first. Then you can pull its legs off.
Me: Ummmm, yeah, but I’d prefer you didn’t do that.
Girl2: Why?
Me:
Girl2: Don’t tell me you’d feel sorry for it or something.
Me: :: head explodes ::
The day didn’t get better.
I want you to keep in mind these are Christian kids, between the ages of 16 and 18, maybe 19. An 8yo not realizing a flat tire isn’t funny? Doesn’t even register on my scale.
I think you chose a bad analogy for Kid 2. What are the chances that an 8-year-old has ever seen or experienced a flat tyre on a car first-hand? He probably thinks of “flat tyre” as “oh, yeah, you pump it up with your bike pump and five minutes later you’re on your way, what’s the big deal?”. If you’d said “someone might CRASH” and he’d still thought it cool … well, that would be worrying.
OTOH he’s old enough not to litter - especially when there’s a dumpster right there. But he may not have thought of it as littering, since the nails were on the ground to begin with
