I remember that, when i was about six years old (in the mid-1970s), i couldn’t understand why my friend’s family only had a black and white TV, and not a color model.
I pestered my friend’s father about this on more than one occasion, saying things like, “We have a color TV. You should get one, 'cause it’s much better than black and white.” He probably wanted to ram the aerial down my throat, but he was very diplomatic, as i recall.
Mine too, except I think my exact wording would’ve been: “Whoop-de-shit!”
(Other remarks I entertained were “I thought I told you to fix me another drink.” and “Your family needs a bigger house to hide from you.”)
No big deal. She’s only four.
I had a boy who was about 11 tell me his house was bigger than my house. I said “Our house is a perfect size for us.” (They have one more child than we do.) His mother was there and gave him an appropriately dirty look.
Your wife handled it fine. Now if the girl’s mother comes over and say the same thing, let us know. That’s a whole 'nuther ball game we can have fun with.
Kids are brutally honest sometimes, it is only as they grow up they learn to hide the truth, avoid the truth, smear the truth, colour the truth, outright lie, what have you.
As the OP said, what she said was true, and was responded to with truth, sounds like the best plan to me.
Bigger is almost always better when you are four.
My four year old was in the car the other day with her five year old brother. And they were talking about daycare teachers. We have one daycare teacher who is rather…heavyset.
4yrold: “Miss Sharon is fat.”
5yrold: “That isn’t a nice thing to say.”
4yrold: “Why not, means she’s bigger than yoooouuuuu!”
(Which kind of goes against Brainiac’s description of our children as little comparers who don’t make emotionally loaded statements. But illistrates how clueless they are on the nature of those statements.)
I had a similar thing come up over the weekend. An older kid (maybe 10) called my 4 year old “little”, which did not go over well at all. He got mad, saying he was a “big boy”.
I took the opportunity to try and teach. “You are a big boy, but he’s bigger, you see? To him, you are little. To me, he is little. (then we saw two bugs on the bench) Which bug is bigger? (he pointed to the bigger of the two). Is that a big bug or a little bug? (he said little–“Yittle” 
) But he’s bigger than the other bug, right? (yes) But not as big as you, right?..etc, etc, etc…”
Once I compared him to his 7 month old cousin, he seemed to “get” the whole bigger by comparison thing. Then out of nowhere, he decided he wanted watermelon, so class dismissed.
A very patronizing “That’s nice, dear” would have been my choice. It’s not as if the girl would have picked up on it, and it lets you get some satisfaction after her comment.
I’m with everyone on the age of comparisons. Many years ago, my 4-year-old cousin was at our house. He annouced to us: “We have the same [baseboard heaters] in our house, but ours aren’t that dusty!” :eek:
When we told my aunt about it later, she was mortified, but we all laughed, because he truly didn’t mean it as an insult of our housekeeping.
Kids compare things all the time, not to be competitive (although they do that too). And they’re brutally honest because they don’t know any better.
When I was four years old, the woman who rented our house (at the time) came to see what we had done to it, or something like that. I had remembered my mother saying what a mess it was when we moved in, so I piped up with something like, “Oh, you’re the lady who left the house a mess.”
:smack:
(To be fair, the woman was incredibly polite, and simply said, “I just didn’t have the time to fix it up, but it looks great now!”)