Ageism, I Love It

[JohnT]

[Sava]

hey, I was giving you a compliment!

[Japher]

a backhanded one

[JohnT]

My cheek is still stinging....

[Sava]

I'm hurt...

here I am trying to be nice and you guys throw it back in my face

[OzzyKP]

Originally posted by JohnT
So are we.

After all, we're the ones saying "kids have a mind of their own." Only the childless believe "kids mind their own."

[Sava]

actually, I think the childless believe "parents should mind their children"

so tell me... uppity parents... what is wrong with minding your children?

The parents I know (my own, my cousins, my aunts and uncles) agree with my position.

[JohnT]

Originally posted by Sava
actually, I think the childless believe "parents should mind their children"

so tell me... uppity parents... what is wrong with minding your children?

The parents I know (my own, my cousins, my aunts and uncles) agree with my position.

I have no idea what you're talking about. What I said was that children have a mind of their own, and even more importantly, live in a different world than "adults" do. They don't mind you like the automatons the childless expect them to be. That's all I'm saying in these threads - two and three year-olds occassionally like the fact that they're causing trouble in public places.

Hell, you do too, Sava. Just a different sort of trouble. (And you don't care to be public about it either.) Children... children don't know shame or embarrasment, they only know what they want and they will stretch the boundaries, your boundaries, to see what your breaking point is. It's cold, it's calculated, and, sometime in every parent's life, each and every single one of their children will go through periods where it is just impossible to take you brats out. You will purposely break, steal, grab, spit, vomit, fart, burp, crap, "mommy, I have to go to the bathroom", and develop some bizarre tic in regards to going out with your parents at some time in your young lives.

Y'all ****in' do this ****. It's not like we're asking you to act like a goddamn bat out of hell at Kroger, you're the ones who decide to do it. We put you in the cart, you want out. We put you out, you want in with the groceries. You want. You want. You want. You want. And when you don't get what You Want, you sometimes act badly.

As for Sophie, she, for the most part, "misbehaves" precisely the amount that I allow her. Dad has the Voice, the Eye, and the Upraised Finger of Doom. However, the child will go through periods where, and I'm not joking - other Dad's will back me up, they do nothing but look at me and test to see where her boundaries are. Sometimes "the game" is to get Dad mad enough to have him stand up, roaring so that Sophie will start crying "I'm sorry", calm down, rinse and repeat.

And you don't want to know what her mother goes through. There are times when Sophie decides to be so anti-mommy (i.e., doing all the behaviors that her mother hates) that it is no doubt but purposeful. Laura and her mother went through a tempestuous stage, and I won't be surprised to see the same with her and Sophie. Hell, I saw a stage like that earlier this year. Sometimes Laura would be in tears as to how Sophie acted in the store. Yeah, that same smiling, beautiful "Best Actress" that a number of y'all have met.

But she's well-behaved. She knows that a threat will get followed through so she doesn't really test me all that often. (I follow through on even the inadvertant threats - I once told her that if she would do something she would lose a stuffed animal. The potential punishment was rather harsh for the crime and I regretted it when I said it... but here's the thing: Sophie saw that I regretted it, got that look on her face, and promptly, while staring at me, reached over and did whatever it was that I just told her not to.

Poor kitty - we'll miss him. But damn that was one loud night!)

So, here's the thing: a bothersome child is not necessarily a reflection of the parents but is more a reflection of an age, a mindset, and a situation in which we all went through ourselves. It's not as if a parent is asking patience because "well, you'll be here when you have your kids", they're asking patience because you did the very same thing to the world as our child is doing to y'all.

What happens after a child starts being bothersome is another issue, but I did want to take up for the kids - they are just going to do their own thing!

And I thought that was a good thing... Ozzy?

[Sava]

you expect me to read all that?

[JohnT]

Yup.

[Sava]

i'm too stoned right now

maybe tomorrow

[Sikander]

Originally posted by JohnT
Ahhhhh, the reversion to ad hominems and insults. They are truly the ammunition of the witless and ignorant.

Praise the lord and pass the ad hominems, asshat!

[loinburger]

I don't expect parents to make their kids behave like perfect little angels, but I don't see anything wrong with not necessarily subjecting everybody else (those with children and those without) to the worst of your kids' tantrums. It's like those notices that I've seen in movie theaters -- something along the lines of "we think that your baby is cute as all hell, but if he/she is crying, then please take it outside." Babies cry sometimes, there's nothing you can do about it short of removing the kid's vocal cords (or is it chords? I can never remember), but please just take the baby out in the hall until he/she stops crying -- you'll miss part of the movie, but the alternative is to make the rest of us miss part of the movie along with you.

But at the same time there's a certain "reasonable" degree of misbehaving I expect out of kids. F'rinstance, when I see weekend matinees of movies like Shrek and Chicken Little then I expect that I'll probably be surrounded by kids who will (go figure) not be behaving like adults -- they'll be talking during the movie, they'll be squirming in their seats, they'll want frequent bathroom breaks, etc. That's fine, that's just kids not being adults. But when a kid starts throwing a temper tantrum then I'd expect the parent to take the kid out in the hall until he/she calms down -- it's not an indictment of the parent that the kid is throwing a temper tantrum (I think that my parents did a great job raising me, but I still threw my share of temper tantrums because, well, because I was a kid), but there's still no reason to subject the rest of us to it.

[OzzyKP]

Originally posted by JohnT
Children... children don't know shame or embarrasment, they only know what they want and they will stretch the boundaries, your boundaries, to see what your breaking point is. It's cold, it's calculated, and, sometime in every parent's life, each and every single one of their children will go through periods where it is just impossible to take you brats out. You will purposely break, steal, grab, spit, vomit, fart, burp, crap, "mommy, I have to go to the bathroom", and develop some bizarre tic in regards to going out with your parents at some time in your young lives....

As for Sophie, she, for the most part, "misbehaves" precisely the amount that I allow her. Dad has the Voice, the Eye, and the Upraised Finger of Doom. However, the child will go through periods where, and I'm not joking - other Dad's will back me up, they do nothing but look at me and test to see where her boundaries are. Sometimes "the game" is to get Dad mad enough to have him stand up, roaring so that Sophie will start crying "I'm sorry", calm down, rinse and repeat.

And people say kids are irrational. Even kids as young as Sophie (far outside the realm of ages that I'm fighting for really) can clearly show reason in the above examples of testing the boundries. Like a little scientist testing the world around her. Isn't the scientific method one of the most reasonable, logical processes man has yet invented? Identify a question/problem, think up a hypothesis, test that hypothesis, draw a conclusion, etc. Isn't that pretty much what little kids do on a daily basis?

Yet no one sees this misbehavior as a sign of intelligence and reason. Behavior equates intelligence in a way. A good behaved kid is seen as smarter, more rational, and more "adult" than a misbehaved one. Even though that misbehavior may indeed be the most intelligent, rational, and adult thing kids do. So it gets overlooked.

That kids apply their cunning reason to testing authority and not to nuclear physics does not discount their reason. You see this also in school. The many distractions and problems that students do in class instead of paying attention are not a sign of their stupidity or ADD (not always at least), but are a means of resisting something they object to but have no power over. What is particularly striking is that the US Army has a list of things soldiers should do when in a POW camp to retain their sanity and their humanity. Many of them are simple disruptive things that are identical to the kinds of things kids do in school. Both are efforts to assert one's independence, even in a situation of captivity. Showing that while the teacher/prison guard may control where my body must be, they cannot control my mind.

Not that I'm saying all kids should disrupt class and antagonize their parents, I'm not. But it is perfectly rational.

[KrazyHorse]

And it's perfectly rational of us to ask that if a child is behaving particularly dispruptively that the parent either regulate his behaviour or remove the child from the public area.

Most parents do a pretty good job of this.

Some are irresponsible and don't. I find it reasonable to post a sign reminding them of the standards of good behaviour, or to eject somebody who persists in failing in their duties as a parent.

My mother, who raised 3 of us (4.5 years between youngest and oldest) has as much experience as most people here, but I've seen her complain when parents disrespect the rights of others to peaceably do their shopping or eat dinner because heaven forbid they discipline their little angel.