Don’t sweat it. It’s typical of this place.
I assume it is just blowing off steam, with no actual intent to injure anyone, but there is no question that a lot of people here are very bitter about kids. The topic comes up about once a week.
It’s a bit sad, actually.
I believe the PC term is phallocephallic children.
No, they are doing what *rude *children do. Children do lots of things; some rude, some not. When they are doing non-rude things we don’t notice, or open threads in MPSIMS talking about how cute they are.
Children do not get a pass on being rude assholes because they are children. They get a talkin’ to, which the OP as done. If they are your own kids they might get a spanking or a time-out or whatever parents do with their rude children.
And for the record, Canadians have poisonous plants, pellet guns, legal action and mouse traps (and probably ovens too) and you don’t seem annoyed at them. There’s no indication the OP is going to make use of any of these suggestions more than Canadians are going to use them to keep out invaders.
You can forget about the condo board. If it’s a typical board, it won’t do anything.
I hope you get a break somehow, though.
Bribe them with fatty junk food if they’ll stay off your flowers. They’re kids; impossible that they’ll resist. And once they’re hooked, they won’t want to endanger where they’re getting their fix from.
Eventually, they’ll be so chubby that they just won’t have the energy to waddle over your flowers anymore, and the problem will be solved.
Once again, science! solves everything. Thank you, high fructose corn syrup!
They are not just doing what kids do. My kids don’t even stomp through the flower beds in their own yard, much less go about destroying the neighbors’ yards.
In this case where other steps have already been taken to curb the behavior, an obnoxious plant, which will only annoy the child if he/she goes in a place they shouldn’t be, is a reasonable solution.
Well to be fair, this is a common area, not the neighbor’s yard. Not that the kids should be destroying things there, but deliberately placing a plant to harm in a public area strikes me as more than a trifle obnoxious too, if not downright illegal.
Putting a plant in a common area is obnoxious? I don’t know, if I lived there, I’d just think whoever did it was considerate for wanting to beautify the place. I also know that if I went around stomping on plants for no good reason, my parents would have put the fear of god into me. I mean, who does that?
If it is poison ivy or stinging nettle as has been suggested?
Where on earth have I said “putting a plant in a common area is obnoxious”?
That’s right, I didn’t. I also seem to remember saying the kids shouldn’t have been stomping on them.
Apart from that, you are absolutely spot on. Well done.
Both.
May I also suggest cactus
Has it been established that this is a common area or is it a non fenced off private area? In some condo complexes the owners do get sections of property that are theirs to do with as they please and the condo owner owns that spot of lawn just as much as they own the condo. In those cases, the area in question would not be common and it would be perfectly appropriate to plant whatever one wants in that plot of land. It might be neighborly to warn the mother, just to let her know where her kids have been when they come home with a rash.
Emphasis added.
Sorry this ended up way longer that I inteded.
Short version: Annoy the hell out of the condo board until they actually do something.
Long version:
I had to share a double garage with another tennet when I had a condo and he would routinely put a bunch of crap on my side so that I couldn’t park in my side of the garage. His side was packed back to front and floor to ceiling with stuff and he would go in there to get something and have to move a bunch of stuff out of his way and into my side but then not move the stuff back.
I asked him to remove his stuff everytime he did so but he would do it again several weeks to a month later.
After 6 months I called the condo association and they said they would talk to him and after a couple of days he moved his stuff. A couple of weeks later he did it again so I called the assocaition again and they said they would talk to him and he finally did a couple of days later.
A month later the same thing happened except this time I called the office the first thing the next morning. Then I called again about fours later while I was at work and asked if he had removed his stuff. Then I called again right before I was about to leave work to see if he had removed his stuff. When I got home his stuff was still there so I called again saying his stuff was still there.
At this point they were getting pissed at me which I felt was a good thing because then they might actually do something.
Well the next morning his stuff was still there so I called them again and they said very sternly that they will take care of it and there is no need to call again and I told them that as long as his stuff is in my space I will be calling them. I called them again while I was at work but they did not answer. So when I got home and saw that his stuff was still in my spot I walked to the office and asked them why they have not done anything and they were really annoyed at this point and said they had asked the guy to move his stuff. I told them the stuff was still there and that I would wait in the office until they told the guy to move his stuff asap.
So they called the guy and told him I was there requesting that he move his stuff back to his side and so he finally did. I went back to my place and back around to the garage to find him moving his stuff over and he was annoyed at me because the office had been calling him several times a day asking him to move his stuff. I told him if he would just keep his stuff on his side then I would not be annoying the office and thus they would not be annoying him.
Thankfully he moved about 4 months later and the new garage neighbors were nice people.
Yes, the state of the average “parenting” job these days is extremely sad. On one hand we have the helicopter parents, on the other we have the ones that lose total interest in their kids after they get past the cute stage, and the great in between is very sparsely populated. I wish parenting classes were mandatory because, yes, it is hard work teaching kids to be worthwhile humans, and far too many people don’t seem to want to do that job these days - after they’ve already had two or three “kyute widdle babees”.
I suppose we should be sick and tired of the parents, but it isn’t the adults that are stomping thru my flowers, kicking over my planters and denting the next door neighbor’s garage door. And while it is the adults that invite people over for a party, it isn’t them who scream blue murder in the pool for hours on end. So, I plant roses with big thorns in my front garden, throw anything that lands in my backyard away and snarl at kids that are/are about to break something of mine. If for no other reason than I don’t always know whose kids they are!
What’s wrong is a lot of kids have not been trained to be decent or even tolerable human beings so we react to them like the worthless scum they (currently) are.
Poisonous plants, pellet guns, and mouse traps are what you might call ‘learning experiences’. If the parents are too dumbass to train their kids what it’s not acceptable not to do, a little negative reinforcement might, theoretically, help to teach the brats to be better human beings. (The ovens, perhaps not.)
Legal action is designed to try and train the scummy parents what’s not acceptable to do - specifically, raising hellions. You don’t actually take legal action against kids.
Try pissing out the front door.
To clarify a couple of things…
I am a 30ish year old guy.
My garden is a small patch of dirt that is under my stairs. It is mine to do with as I please under our CC&Rs. I am not 100% sure that it is not the .0075 or whatever of an acre that I “own”, but what happens on that dirt is my discretion. Every homeowner/renter has such a patch. Some residents plant stuff, but most have rock gardens.
I do not advocate the real life abuse of children by any means.
I just am frustrated for most of the reasons people have listed. When I started with my little patch of dirt it was a rock garden like all the rest, filled with river rock, nails, glass, OLD soda cans, and a mess of other crap. It is not a nice little garden that would be even nicer if kids did not mess with it. I was not allowed to be a little jerk kid when I was growing up. Why should they?
Oh, did you mean that putting a painful plant (i.e., nettles) in a public place was obnoxious? Okay, I didn’t get that from your post.
I support the kindness approach. If the kids are playing in stairwells, they are probably bored. And it sounds like they aren’t getting a ton of adult attention. And like most children they probably don’t understand the efforts and joys of keeping a garden. To them, it’s probably a bunch of plants like any other plants and they have no concept of why they should care.
Run to the garden center and get something fun to plant- something that you can eat and that grows pretty quick. Find the kids and plant this stuff together. or give them their own little pot with a plant in it. With any luck, they’ll get into it and share the joy of watching your garden grow. Not only will you solve your garden problem, but you’ll make a tiny but significant impact on these kids lives. Just knowing someone cares to show you some kindness for just a little bit can be a huge thing to a kid.
I know your not Santa Claus, and its not your job to make kids happy. But we have so few chances in this life to do good deeds that we ought to take them when they come. Go make everyone’s lives better instead of worse.
Says who? God? The president? Part of living in a society is occasionally dealing with people from classes you don’t like. And part of living in a neighborhood is interacting with children. If you don’t want to see anyone ever, go live in the woods.
