The cure all in my house was, “If you’re bored, I’ll give you something to do”. Stopped ALL complaining.
What are they bemoaning? Their school activities are being canceled - that’s a legit thing to gripe about. The global economy is fucked - can’t say I’m happy about that, either.
Now, if they’re bemoaning their blue car when all their friends have red cars, or something, that’s different.
Yes it is, if you over focus on it. What parents discover in the end is once the kids are grown, and you are no longer legally required to love them and care for them, the sense of relief is so great you forget all about this kind of nonsense you had to endure along the way.
It’s a magical place.
My sympathies, kambuckta. Kids are inherently selfish little monsters. It’s hard to say what works on them, because there are so many influences and such a delay in how things impact their character. I do like the idea of modeling charity, because even if it doesn’t reprogram their greedy little brains, you’re still doing some good in the world. Discussions or portrayals of people who have it worse are probably best brought up at a neutral time, not in response to their frustrations. Think of it this way: even in Oz, I’m sure you have things you’d like to change. I mean, I don’t follow your politics that closely, but I keep hearing about these roving gangs of criminal wildlife that no one has the courage to stand up to. But you have the right to complain about marauding wombats without a lot of whataboutism deflection in return, and so do the little cunts, even though their complaints are definitely stupider.
Sometimes what they want to do is eat chocolate and ice cream all day while mama dedicates herself to ceaselessly entertaining them. I agree that simple mockery all by itself is counterproductive, but part of the process is teaching them that they aren’t entitled to whatever they want, and that they need to find a way to shape their wants to what they can have.
I think it’s weird to assume that what people want is something outrageous. I guess it’s possible that the kid really wants to eat chocolate and ice cream all day, and will take nothing less, but maybe that’s just a shorthand for “something besides canned chilli again”.
I don’t think you can really shape your wants. You can accept that you may have to wait for what you want, or you may only be able to have part of what you want, but that’s not really the same thing.
And the things parents say now out of frustration can affect the child’s life for a very long time. When I was a kid, I made the mistake of telling my mom I’d like to go to Europe. She said, “You’re probably never going to get to Europe!” She said this like I was asking to go on vacation on Jupiter. And for the longest time, I had a mental block - I figured Europe was for other people and not for me. I visited Africa before I visited Europe, even though Europe was closer - that’s how strong the mental block was.
Kids remember this shit for decades.
Yes really being born in the western world, you really already have won the lottery especially if you compare someplace like Australia to say Somalia.
But even saying that, arent their still crappy areas of Australia in the outback areas? Maybe visit them?
You can’t just ‘rock up’ to towns and areas administered by the Aboriginal Lands Council. And anyway, we’re on the east coast now, rainforest and mountains and the Great Barrier Reef, a bazillion km away from the poorer outback settlements.
We lived in a ‘crappy’ area for 3 months last year, lots of red dirt, poverty and social unrest…but still, the kids didn’t have to experience any of that (apart from the dirt) because of their white privilege.
My Daddy’s (7 kids, dozens of grandkids) answer to all complaints of boredom was applied yardwork. You sure learned not complain of ‘boredom’
There are lots of videos on YouTube which feature brief dialogues with homeless people (mostly American?). You could watch some and make a playlist of content/age-appropriate videos and watch them with your kids.
There is a wide variety, from stereotypical drug addicts (including alcohol), to lgbt teenagers kicked out by fundamentalist parents.
There are amateur and professional videos which document poverty in slums worldwide. An example I remember featured children born into prostitution in brothels in India.
-
Here’s a comparison of 100 days of various scares we’ve had. Sometimes it runs by itself; sometimes you may need to click play. Watch Covid 19 climb and pass them all by day 100.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/fxoxti/coronavirus_deaths_vs_other_epidemics_from_day_of/ -
Here’s a comparison with Spanish flu. WOW!
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/fxucds/for_everyone_asking_why_i_didnt_include_the/ -
Here’s a video about the Spanish flu. You could be healthy in the morning, dead by nightfall. They ran out of coffins and they had to get armed guards to stop people from stealing them. If your loved one died, you just left him on the front porch; a wagon would come through the neighborhood to pick up the dead when they could.
https://www.pbs.org/video/american-experience-influenza-1918/
If parents just hand them things (cell phones, video games, etc.) without any work, they don’t appreciate it. They can get jobs and buy their own things. If it took 2 of their paychecks to buy a bicycle they probably won’t leave it in the driveway—that sort of thing. No job? They can clean your house, mow your yard, etc. And when they move out, let them have crappy furniture etc.—don’t bankroll them when they buy a car. Let them experience not having things so they appreciate the things they do have. There are no free lunches and most everything comes with strings attached. A modest gift at Christmas or a birthday ok just because you love them ok, but make them earn their own way.
That’s a rough story, and I am sorry that happened to you. But often what my son wants isn’t some big abstract goal, it’s for mom not to have to go to work and to hang out with him all the time. And I am a super involved parent. We hang out a lot, we play together a lot. But I have to have a job for us to you know, eat and have a roof over our head, which means he has had to learn that just because he’s bored doesn’t mean he’s entitled to have me drop everything and play Minecraft. Sometimes you just don’t get what you want when you want it, and you have to find another way to amuse yourself. I’m not a bad mother because I say “No, I have a meeting right now, you will need to find something else to do”.
Kids remember a lot of shit that last a lifetime. Doesn’t mean they are scarred for life over it.
It’s important for kids to learn how to cope with deprivation without complaining about it constantly. I think if i had kids who were driving me nuts with complaining, I’d give them all a complaint quota. You get X opportunities to express your negative opinions about the injustices of life without anyone telling you to hush up. After you’ve eaten up your quota for the day, I don’t want to hear about how bored you are, how hungry you are, or how unfair it is we can’t go to the mall/beach/movies/pizzeria. If you have a reasonable request (“Can we go ride bikes?”), then I’ll consider it respectfully. But no one is entitled to incessantly bitch and moan and whine about every little thing. Doesn’t matter if you’re 5 or 50.
I had parents who would yell at you before you even thought about complaining. So I learned that my feelings weren’t important and that expressing opinions was bad, and it took me a long time to deprogram myself out of this. But the other extreme–parents indulging their kids’ discontent at every turn–isn’t healthy either.
IMHO, this sort of (somewhat passive-aggressive) response by parents works in the short run but backfires in the long run. It sets up an adversarial relationship between parents and children - it teaches kids that if they express an honest sentiment, it can be manipulated by the parent into generating a snarkily negative outcome for the kid. Then communication is sabotaged from that point on.
Gonna disagree with that, Velocity; limited data point, but it worked fine on me. If I complained about having nothing to do, my mother started listing chores. She was usually working at some of them herself at the time. I learned to find things to do; or at least not to bug her about it. ETA: and no, it didn’t mess up my communication with her otherwise.
And I don’t see what’s “passive-agressive” about it.
That said, this isn’t a usual situation. Maybe a set chunk of time each day for everybody to Bitch Out Loud and get heard; then a bit of time to make any actual practical suggestions in response; and then the rest of the day everybody shuts up about it and lives with what needs to be lived with?
I know the dynamic Velocity is talking about–it’s less about the particular words, and more that when a kid is struggling, their concerns are minimized and they get a “gotcha”. The upshot is that a kid is left feeling like they were a stupid spoiled brat for complaining. People who do this do it with a sorta one-upmanship approach. Teachers like to do this, sometimes: a kid has what may or may not be a reasonable reason for asking for an extension and you don’t just say no, you twist it into a way that makes them humiliated that they even asked. Then you tell everyone the story in the faculty lounge to show how you are smarter and slicker than a child.
When I was a teenager, I had a pretty good sense that we were living a pretty good middle class life. But I was mature for my age (I grew out of it), so I don’t know how common that was. I do recall some of my daydreams involved us, or me in particular, having it worse, sort of as an adventure.
But I’ll tell you one thing that might have had an unintended effect: every summer we would make the trek from Florida to NY-OH, in the pre-Interstate Highways days, in a station wagon without air conditioning (because it really wasn’t common then), and we CAMPED every night during the journey (3-4 days each way). And I HATED camping (why can’t we stay in a motel?); every evening setting up an 8x8 tent, unpacking the sleeping bags and camp stove and eating whatever could be cooked on it. I felt really uncomfortable.
I never equated, consciously, that experience with being homeless or poor, but I believe camping out for a few days, even in a campground, is a good learning experience, in a lot of ways.
Ah, I think I see what you mean.
I never got the impression from my mother that she thought I was stupid for complaining. I just got the impression that I was being a normal kid who was trying something that my mother (I was her third) had learned how to cope with.
Also, I suppose, I got the impression that she thought I had the resources and ability to come up on my own with something to do. She would sometimes praise me for such things as making my own toys from whatever was around the house. (I had plenty of toys; but often found the things I came up with on my own to be more interesting.)
I can say that in my case it worked pretty well, I learned how to entertain myself instead of being given extra work to do. I already wanted to read than do almost anything else except watch TV, so retreating into a book was no hardship.
I also figured out that my parents were not there to provide entertainment, they already had jobs both to earn income and at home to keep the household, the latter of which I was already obliged to assist with. Not to mention the difference between a transient feeling of boredom and more important and long-lasting feelings. I think my parents did a good job of instilling responsibility by teaching and reminding me that getting entertainment is a privilege earned by getting chores out of the way.