You annoy me.
I know kids will be kids. And while you can't necessarily stop your child from being a brat, you can interfere at the moment of offence and create a learning atmosphere. Here's an example. If you see your child throwing rocks, approach the child.
Parent: "Johnny, please don't throw rocks. You could hurt somebody by doing that."
See, isn't that simple? You've created a learning moment. Now, I know this may sound like a challenge (especially to the mother sitting under the park shelter so interested in her own conversation with her friends that she isn't so much as occasionally turning her head toward her child throwing rocks), BUT, it can be done.
And, when your child displays early warning signs of a delinquent vandal, please address the child and the situation. For example, if your child rips the streamers off of another child’s bike. Please don’t look at the afflicted child and say, “Ah, you look sad.” I would recommend a sincere apology. If you’d like to go the extra mile I recommend actually offering to pay for the damage/replacement of the bike streamers. Finally, I recommend some form of discipline for the delinquent child. A forced apology from the delinquent to the afflicted child is just not enough to teach the lesson.
Please, Idle Parent, take interest in raising your child. Because, I don’t want my tax dollars paying for your brats meals while in juvenile detention.
Sincerely,
Bekah
2 Comments:
I don't know Bek, these are sort of revolutionary concepts!
I think it would be all I could do to hold myself back if someone actually said to my kid "Ah you look sad." after their child had just ripped the streamers off my kids bike! "ah, you look sad."?!?!? What kind of lame response is that?
I have family members like this. Clueless. At a recent family event their children kept leading my kids into mischeif like this and I had to keep being the heavy because they weren't paying attention. The sad part was that Ben wasn't there so I was doing all of the parenting pretty much alone but the mom and dad were both there for them. They just weren't paying attention and more importantly, didn't like to discipline their children.
Anyway, I'm sorry. It doesn't sound like ya'll had a good time at the park.
By
Addie, at 1:05 PM
Thanks for the sympathy, Ad. It really wasn't all bad of a night. Kiersten handled the situation much better than I did. We still enjoyed ourselves. I just was very perturbed and needed to rant.
By
Rebekah, at 1:19 PM
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