“Stop responding and they’ll ignore you.” From many adult authority figures, including my parents. (In retrospect, they must have felt pretty helpless at the time.)
No, stop responding and the bullies will simply up the ante until you HAVE to or you feel you have no self-respect left whatsoever. Maybe this worked back in your day, but in the 1980s it Did Not Work At All.
When I was little, like, 3-4, I asked my mom where I came from. I distinctly remember that she was in a pissy mood.
“mommy, where did I come from? Theres no chimney for the stork”
“I bought you at safeway and I lost the reciept, so I couldn’t take you back. I’m stuck with you.”
My mothers husband is the poster child for what not to say to kids.
“Until you’re 18, I own you. You will do as I say. Now eat your goddamned Tomatoes!(I LOATHE tomatoes)”
“You can eat it and like it or just eat it.”
“You’re a child. You have no say.(last week)”
“If I wanted your opinion, then I’d squeeze your head.”
“Quiet from the peanut gallery”
“You know, You’re the reason people use birth conrtol.”
Mom wasn’t bad… although it wasn’t the things she said so much as what she did. She’d put the kitchen timer on at supper(I was a slow eater) and If I wasn’t finished in 15 minutes, I went to bed for the night.
They also accuse me of having an attitude. ALL THE FRIGGIN TIME. And that’l be when I’m asking them why I’m in trouble. They think I’m talking back because I want them to explain why it is I’m being grounded. Mothers husband used to ground me if I didn’t say good morning to him.
sigh I’m never having kids.
One that always infuriated me and still does is the adult’s “So? life’s not fair” response to the child’s protest “that’s not fair!”. Why destroy a child’s natural sense of justice?
For me personally, the most irritating was a teacher telling me repeatedly that I was “so irresponsible”. Irresponsible? Hello? I was eight years old! This still rankles after all these years - I think the way we are labelled as children has a huge effect - sometimes we act up to the labels, sometimes we spend years trying to erase them.
BTW, some of the stories in this thread, (eg Tanookie, DeVena, Ironic ) were so sad - really hope things are better for you now.
Generally as a parent you should avoid saying things that define the child
you’re stupid
you’re smart
both of those communicate the parent’s ability (attempt) to tell the child what he/she is rather than allowing the child to define him/herself.
Now, there is admittedly less harm in defining the child as something “good” but even so, it’s your definition of someone else spoken as if it’s THE definition.
OK, can someone explain to me what’s so bad about this? I don’t have kids yet, but it seems like a reasonable thing to say. Can’t you tell a kid when they’re being bad?
Definitely tell the child when he/she is behaving in a way that you don’t approve of.
Definitely make the child aware that his behavior is likely to lead to (insert consequences here).
Be careful being the entity that defines “bad” though. You’re not god, and your child will soon find that out.
RE: the “good katy, bad katy” thing,
its mostly just creepy to hear one person speak to another in that way.
I have no problem with that way of intervening with a child as long as it’s based on some agreement between the parent and child that helps the kid re focus herself.
I’m starting to understand . . . Mommy and Daddy were so mean to me, because they introduced me to this little thing called “reality” . . .
Why is “reality” only the grim stuff? “Reality” includes both injustice and justice, fairness and its opposite.
The “life’s not fair so let’s just accept it” approach seems a poor sort of way to introduce children to the world.
This was not actually something that was said to me - it just makes me mildly sad when I hear parents say “life’s not fair” to kids, because it seems to be crushing youthful idealism before it has really begun. But maybe I’m too idealistic about children.
I think the biggest problem with just dismissing kids with ‘life isn’t fair’ is that it teaches them their concerns are not relevant or important. Parents need to address the issue in a little more detail especially as the children get older!
My mother was discussing me with her friends one day in our living room. I heard my name and popped in as I was curious what they were discussing about me. I was told that nothing she said to any of her friends was any of my business. We had a huge arguement in front of her friends that boiled down to how I was only a child and a rude one at that and that even if she was talking about me I was not allowed to know what she said. Not only did she make herself look like a moron in front of her friends (shrieking at an 8 year old is a bit much) but she taught me how irrelevant and unimportant I really was. Her parting salvo was that life is not fair.
Trust me I learned very very very early that life wasn’t fair and didn’t need to be reminded nearly so often.
Well, put it this way: a child’s natural perspective on things is extremely self-centered–not only am I the center of my universe, I am the center of Mommy’s and Daddy’s, and probably everyone else’s as well. “Fair” to a child means treatment that’s consistent with this solipsistic world view.
Moreover, disillusionment is inevitable if the kid is ever to grow up. Stories like tanookie’s above, where the mom makes it clear that she has her own life with her own friends, and the kid isn’t so important in the scheme of things after all–entirely reasonable assertions, I think–illustrates how much this hurts. But it doesn’t mean that the parents were bad people, if they decided not to succumb to the wills of their little would-be tyrants.
The problem in my parents house was that my parents were bad people. It wasn’t just that my parents existed as people as well as parents and that they had adult friends and activities that did not include little tykes toys (I think those things are required for you to be a decent parent) my mother simply felt I was not as important as the image she wanted to cultivate with her friends/peers. Sure you can’t cave to every whim of your children… that will teach them to be egocentric forever but you also need to recognize that you brought children into the world and since there are many things they don’t understand and cannot deal with alone you need to be there with and for them. Sometimes that means a bit of sacrifice on the parent’s part.
A few years after the above incident my mother caught my father attempting sex with me. Unfortunately she couldn’t take any time off from work to deal with this and she was afraid of the stigma it would bring to the family so she decided it was easier to just ignore. Hammered home just how unfair life is like no other lesson ever has.
To my 12-year-old daughter when asked if 15-year-old “Jimmy” could come see her if he put on a suit and tie: “You tell Jimmy that if he comes over wearing a suit and tie, he’s going to get blood all over it.” She’s now 30 and reminds of that comment every time we talk.
Think of it this way. You have a child learning to walk. Once in a while, the child falls. Kids fall when they’re learning to walk; it’s expected.
OTOH, you have situations like tanookie’s, where she’s not necessarily falling on her own, she’s being tripped deliberately. Kids who are deliberately tripped aren’t going to learn to walk. They know they’re being set up to fail, so why bother?
Yeah, you have Mommy and Daddy, and you have two adults with adult interests. In a healthy family, that’s the ideal. The downside hits when you have a family that’s too child-centered, where the parents don’t take the time for themselves or to be together as a couple. The other extreme are people like tanookie’s (and my) mother, who are themselves self-centered, and who view their children as embarrassments or inconveniences.
Kids, for their part, start out very dependent. As they grow and develop, they become more independent, but they still require parental guidance to become entirely self-sufficient. And kids, more than anything, want their parents’ approval. A parent telling a child that they’re unworthy, or unwanted, or disapproved of is very damaging. Some people get over it on their own. Others need help.
But saying that “oh, it was nothing; you really should get over it by now” is not particularly helpful.
Robin
And once again, the above was me, not Airman.
Robin, doing more for Airman’s post count than he could ever dream of. 
“It’s your fault your mother died.”
Said to my mother at age 12 by her father when her mom died of kidney failure.
No kidding.
Obviously, there’s a lot more to tanookie’s story than the one incident I was responding to . . . so sorry if it looked as if I was being callous to what sounds like a really horrible situation.
I dunno about this. Again, I’m talking from partial ignorance here. I don’t ahve children yet, but I have been a child (in the not too distant past.) There are grey areas, but some behaviors are clearly bad, and you don’t have to be god to say so. A young child doesn’t know that hitting people or breaking things are bad, and needs to be told so.
Creepy? In what way? Sorry, I just don’t see it. You’re reaffirming that the child is capable of good behavior (good katy) but telling her that she’s not doing so at the moment (bad katy).
I believe you. In fact, the very same thing was said to me at my mother’s funeral by my aunt. I was 20, so I had a couple more coping skills than a 12 year old… some not so healthy, though.
If I had thought of it at the time, I think I would have responded, “Listen, if I had the power to cause cancer, you’d be in big trouble right now, wouldn’t you?”
The one phrase I remember my mother saying all the time when I was a kid was “We can’t afford it” and she would discuss our financial woes with me all the time. That was really, really scary.
Also, “Don’t drink the milk! That’s for my coffee!” This, too, was a constant refrain and it made me feel like I wasn’t as important as she.
“Come here so I can pull your hair”
Mom was too lazy to get off the couch and abuse us. She prefered the sedintary approach to violence.
Mom was/is a bit crazy. She used to lie to my father about how terrible we were to gain his sympathy. She used to spy on us, listen to our phone conversations, and snoop. She would fly off the handle for no reason regularly. I’d say that probably 50% of her utterances from 1979 until 1985 would qualify as ** Things to never say to a child**. On the plus side, the us against her trench warfare bonded the children tightly. I actually have a fairly healthy adult relationship with her now. 3 of my siblings do not.