I had a sister 19 months younger than me and we fought like giant assholes throughout our childhood, which our parents mostly tolerated, but they hugely cracked down on anything they thought was remotely mean or even thoughtless in our treatment of other kids. Ditto with teachers, our social interactions were policed within an inch, and we got called out for normal kid behaviors which are mean but mostly ignored by adults. I would really recommend this, it forced us to learn to develop social skills to interact with almost anybody, and eventually we stopped being mean to each other in our early 20s. Now my sister and I are super close friends as adults, and we talk several times a week sometimes for hours on end.
Don't worry about this. Kids lack well-developed senses of empathy. It takes time. You will either teach them empathy generally, in which case they will intuit that being jerks to other people is shitty (without necessitating any further specific instruction on this, although of course occasions when they are jerks can be useful for teaching general principles of empathy), or you will fail to teach them empathy generally, in which case they will be shitty humans regardless of whether they learn to be polite when interacting with people.
According to what I hear from people in inter-ethnic marriages, your kids are Italian, or possibly Slavic.
3
I've never heard these ethnic stereotypes, would you care to elaborate?
I'm thinking that they are human, although other primates are a distinct possibility.
Agree with 2 that it's probably just a stage they'll grow out of as they get older.
If it starts to worry you, you can explain to them that being evil with a surface veneer of politeness will get them further in life than being openly rude.
6
According to this NOVA I just watched, it's highly possible they're actually Neanderthal.
I haven't encountered insane R.I.E. parents of little kids with my almost-2 year old yet, but there were a bunch of them around my older kid. Their mantra was obsessive "let them fight it out so they can learn to work it out" and they would sit around at parties congratulating themselves for being brave enough to let their kids push other kids without intervening. Their kids aren't old enough yet, so it's too tell if those kids will grow up to be insane jerks or not. Probably!
The almost-2 year old is like the world's sweetest guy, except when he gratuitously pushes some kid down on the playground. So, maybe not the world's sweetest guy? I guess that's literally the definition of being a big jerk. I try to intervene and act appropriately discouraging but who knows what the fuck that does or doesn't do. Maybe the insane R.I.E. people were right.
So, growing up my family dynamic was contentious. Not lacking empathy, exactly, but... how to put it? Hmmm. My college boyfriend met my family and then observed that he finally understood my caustic sense of humor. Shiv warned his mother before our wedding that "she and her sisters squabble all the time -- it doesn't actually mean anything bad."
My sisters and I are close, I think (what are the standards for close?), but it wouldn't have hurt us to be a bit better at navigating social relationships as kids (we all figured it out as older teenagers but middle school was hell for me -- intellect outstripping empathy.) A sharp word as you did probably isn't amiss.
9: There's a fine line between letting kids work it out and expecting other toddlers to parent your child...
I mostly wish that I spent less time criticizing my son and/or trying to tell him how to behave and much more time demonstrating patience, gratitude, and positivity. (I deleted the sentence that I typed first bc I said it was all your fault and your kids were doomed. Thus, demonstrating that I am a crappy parent who is too sarcastic.)
I dont think it is good parenting to criticize your children with constant: "Don't be critical of others!"
Im not saying you never correct them or punish them, but I think we do it entirely too much. Or at least I did.
more time demonstrating patience, gratitude, and positivity
Well, that's not happening, so I need a Plan B.
I don't know what RIE stands for.
I don't either. It's some kind of philosophy.
Resources for Infant Educarers, according to google. I would not have guessed that.
Consistency
We establish clearly defined limits and communicate our expectations to develop discipline.
https://www.rie.org/educaring/ries-basic-principles/
Those parents probably didn't read down to the bottom of the page.
I don't know. I do agree with will about modeling nice behavior, but I explicitly got in trouble for being a li'l shit, and it was a formative experience. Not, "don't be a shit, you li'l shit," but more, "when you tell X that Y is no longer her friend, you are being mean and hurting her feelings. Also, if X doesn't like Y, she can tell X herself. What you did wasn't being helpful, it was actually really mean. I don't think you're mean, so you shouldn't act mean to other kids."*
Or, "When you told Crystal you got a brand new doll for Christmas, you made her feel bad, because she didn't get a doll, and her grandma couldn't afford a doll for her. How would you feel if other people got lots of toys we couldn't afford and rubbed it in your face? It's rude and snobby."**
In other words, it was more about explicitly identifying behavior as mean, and then trying to get the child to think about what it felt like to have someone be mean to them.
*True conversation with my first grade teacher.
**True conversation with my dad.
My sister and I fought physically as kids, and then one day I noticed that she flinched when I raised my arm and I unilaterally decided to be nice after that. Took her about a week and then she disarmed too. She loved it, because she wanted her older sister to be nice to her. Then I started TKD and my parents forbade physical fighting and it couldn't return.
It was really my Asian friends that instilled the concept of respect in me.
My family looks for the negative and cuts each other down a lot. I hate it now. I wish we didn't. My full sister and I are entirely out of that mode; my baby siblings (different mother, twenty years later) are deciding whether that will be how they act too. If Steadfast starts to do that too, I expect that I'll police it, probably the way I policed myself when I decided I didn't want to be that way anymore. Say something negative? Follow with two positive things. Practice being kind like a skill, and bite my tongue against my first instinct.
Not to be confused with the REI philosophy, where you buy the kids a spiffy tent and exile them to the Alaskan wilderness for 15 years.
Say something negative? Follow with two positive things. Practice being kind like a skill
What the fuck is happening to this place?
It was a really conscious decision for me to change, occasioned by the death of my nice grandma. I couldn't help but notice that my nice grandma's funeral was filled with people who had loved her, and my mean grandma was wholly isolated and we were all waiting for her to die. Given that they were my two grandmas, I had an equal tendency to either and I had better choose consciously. So I did, for a decade, when I decided I had overcorrected by not letting myself speak anything negative. Then I had to add that back in.
So far as I can tell, there would be mourners at my funeral, so I'm still on the right track.
Anyway, even with squabbling kids, I would still consciously train for kindness.
What the fuck is happening to this place?
Smile R Tigre. We're your friends. The unfogged commenters are the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human beings you've ever known in your life.
For siblings, we were always told, "go work it out." Really egregious things got punished if they were overheard, but our parents were pretty into "no tattling" unless it was something really big, so general squabbling didn't count. There was a period of time where my sister and I weighed the same amount but she was much more physical, and my parents switched from telling me not to hit younger kids to telling me to physically defend myself. Then we fought a lot physically for awhile until we were about 10 or so. Our mother would always say, "she's just trying to get your goat, so don't react and she'll stop." Which was normally true (in either direction). But thinking of the ways we would irritate each other, especially in the car, I'm surprised our parents didn't murder us.
Megan, I thought of you recently, when I saw this article: "We All Know Forgiveness Is Healthy, So Why Is It So Hard?" I know that you said that you did a bunch of reading on the subject; I'd be curious if you agree with her summary of the research:
Forgiveness is a relatively new academic research area, studied in earnest only since Enright began publishing on the subject in the 1980s. The first batch of studies were medical in focus. Forgiveness was widely correlated with a range of physical benefits, including better sleep, lower blood pressure, lower risk of heart disease, even increased life expectancy; really, every benefit you'd expect from reduced stress. The late Kathleen Lawler, while working as a researcher in the psychology department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, studied the effects of both hostility and forgiveness on the body's systems fairly extensively. 'Forgiveness is aptly described as "a change of heart",' she wrote, in summarising a series of studies focused on the impact of forgiveness on heart health. Meanwhile, Duke University researchers found a strong correlation between improved immune system function and forgiveness in HIV-positive patients, and between forgiveness and improved mortality rates across the general population.
...
What all of the researchers and pop-psych proponents of forgiveness agree on is that it takes practice and that it is hard work. Vanzant compares it to pulling out a tooth without Novocaine. Luskin described it as re-training the brain. 'You can get upset about anything - you can also get un-upset about anything, it's just a matter of learning how,' he said.
My guys are pretty harsh with each other -- I've been semi-conscious about how you can be acid with your family, because they have a sense of how these things work, but you have to be kind to other people. I don't think either of them is notoriously awful to their peers.
mourners
I have been thinking about this. Is there a paid service where these can be hired as part of a prepaid deal? My friends are geographically scattered and not that many because not much of a people person, and my family is small. I guess I'd supply the fake mourners with anecdotes to tell each other.
I debate between ashes at sea and a lurid and elaborate headstone.
Parenting is the worst. The absolute worst. Total blind luck for the most part.
Except it is also the very best and totally amazing. All at the same time.
I'm not a parent, so I probably shouldn't weigh in, but by all accounts I was an absolute monster as a child. Like, breaking other children's limbs in nursery school, pushing older kids' heads through glass windows in junior school, etc. And, as far as I can tell, this was basically a constant thing. And I was hyperactive.
Anyway, that basically all stopped at puberty, I learnt social skills and empathy pretty spontaneously, and turned into a kind-of sort-of OK adult. On Megan's scale, I don't think that many people are actively praying for my death, and I'll probably get a couple of mourners in due course. The point being that a lot of things happen at adolescence, in terms of personality, so maybe you shouldn't worry? (Yeah. This isn't useful advice, is it?)
As an aside, I remember almost none of this behaviour. I'm now in my thirties and to this day, people bring up horrible things that I did as a child that I've never heard of before. Someone once told me that people don't remember their early infancy because the way the brain stores memories is changed when children learn language. I'm ascribing my gaping lack of childhood memories to a massive personality change in my mid- to late-teens.
Reading back, this whole thing was kind of OT. Sorry!
29.3: Maybe none of those things really happened, and it's all just a massive conspiracy to mess with your head.
I don't think that many people are actively praying for my death
I kind of like the idea of counting this as a positive achievement. Something you could mention in a job interview when your asked about your strengths.
My dad had a fundamental temperament shift in puberty, he says. He says he used to get super angry as a child, but in puberty became the mellow-indifferent to everything guy I know and love.
29
There was a This American Life a few years back about a kid who was a total monster as a kid, and then grew out of it. If you haven't listened to it you should.
It seems like some kids are shits and some aren't, and it has little correlation to which adults are shits and which aren't. (I feel like there are good kids who become crappy adults, but I don't know.) I had a friend who's now in and out of prison/rehab for stealing and drug use, and she was kind of a shit as a kid and would regularly steal toys from other kids and shop lift and lie about everything for no reason. I was talking with another friend about how you can see a clear trajectory from her childhood behavior to her current behavior, but plenty of people lie and steal as kids and don't grow up to do it as an adult.
27: Professional mourners fall into two broad categories. There's the type you're talking about, which were called "mutes" in Victorian England, or (per Wikipedia) "Rudaali" in Rajasthan.
Then there's the other type.
My sister was a bit like that. She was super bratty beyond the age most kids are bratty (like, full on pound the ground and scream temper tantrums through age 11), and then around age 13-14 she just *poof* changed into being not bratty at all. I on the other hand remained a constant level of low-medium level bratty through this day.
25: Not done with the article, but he is conflating forbearance and forgiveness.
Even the stuff that forgiveness was supposed to be good for - stuff like murders ... it's so rare,' he told me. 'More important is can you forgive your brother-in-law for being annoying? Can you forgive traffic? Those things happen every day. Big things? They happen once in a lifetime, maybe twice. It's a waste of forgiveness. That's my perspective. But forgiveness is really important for smoothing over the normal, interpersonal things that rub everyone the wrong way.'
High forbearance means that the traffic doesn't bug you in the first place. Low forbearance, low forgiveness is a yucky place to live. High forbearance, high forgiveness must be very serene, although I wouldn't know. So far, I am high forbearance, very low forgiveness.
Now I return to the article...
This topic is the basis for juvenile law. As urple mentioned at the top of the thread, kids brains dont fully form until adulthood. Being a horrible kid does not mean you will be a horrible adult. Also why now dont have death penalty for juveniles.
I dunno. The article is pretty incoherent. She hasn't pinpointed the recipient of forgiveness (the nurse, the parents, herself, Leah). She isn't sure what she would get (end of her remorse, better health, intrusive thoughts out of her head) by forgiving. She hasn't identified the wrongdoing (betrayal, neglect, denial). She's sure there's a way to feel better than she does (there must be), but I don't know enough from her article to know if she is out of grief. She could have an entirely different impression once she has let grief take its course.
Also, I don't agree with the URL. I think some of the pressure to forgive is also a pressure to abandon moral standards, and I doubt that pressure feels good to the wronged person.
In short, forgiveness can fuck itself.
I admire the purity of your hate, Megan, but if I hadn't learned to forgive (selectively, ex #2 can go DIAF) I'd be miserable and barely have any relationships with my family.
30: Hmm. Perhaps they invented the conspiracy in revenge for all the mean things I did to them as a kid?
31: This is basically me, except that photocopiers, smartphones, online shopping, etc instantly revert me to a frothing screaming six year old, which can be undignified at times.
32: Yeah. I think that the moral of the story is that it's often completely random how kids turn out. My impression is that, as a UMC parent, you have a few big crude levers that you can pull on (school, neighbourhood, homelife) but so many factors are out of your control and you shouldn't beat yourself up if your kid turns into a terrible person despite your best efforts. All my parents' UMC peers had 2.25 kids, raised them as attentively as they could, and - as far as I can see - got a random distribution of "successful" / "sort of OK albeit also sort of disappointing" / "jailed or dead".
Also I should track down that episode, thanks!
Let the hate flow through you!
I'm too hard on my kid and I feel bad about it. She is extremely sweet and extremely stubborn -- also the type who needs reasons and to be treated roughly as an equal, or will do absolutely nothing -- and I'm sure that a lot of my strategies are counterproductive (others are helpful). I don't have any idea how people can be playful and cheerful and positive and turn everything into a game 100% of the time, though: on the relatively frequent occasions when I pull it off it drains my emotional batteries way, way down, and I collapse shortly after putting kid to bed. Some days, it just doesn't happen.
It's pretty clear that my personality was fixed around age 3 and is never ever going to change, barring serious injuries. Kind of insane.
I think some of the pressure to forgive is also a pressure to abandon moral standards
On behalf of the divorce lawyers, I thank you. My poor children would suffer if people did not have this attitude.
Don't worry, will. Even those of us who tend toward forgiveness can, as Barry mentioned above, make exceptions that are lucrative for you and your kind.
My sister and I didn't fight that much. Occasionally, but she was nastier than me, and I was much more phlegmatic, so it was usually me who de-escalated. Except I could occasionally be pushed into volcanic rage. That pattern has continued through my adult relationships.
She was truly a horrible teenager. A gigantic asshole on every dimension. I am still quite pleased I didn't beat the shit out of her in that phase. I did once chase her into her room (she'd just hit our mother), and slam her door so hard I drove the wood of the door into the frame, trapping her in there. I don't think she ever kicked off with me after that, as it was a demonstration of "You might be a much bigger asshole than me, but I'm a fit 17 year old male. I have reserves of strength and violence that you absolutely don't."
xelA is very sweet with other kids, and really not nasty at all. I've seen him heartbroken at the assholery of other kids. I hope he gets better at coping with it as he gets older. He's 3 now.
I am often shocked though, at the utter cuntery of other parents. I've watched middle class mothers* actively encourage their kids to push him off play equipment so their kids can get a turn.
* always women, 99% of the time, much posher than me.
I don't think that many people are actively praying for my death
But, then again, I don't really spend that much time with religious people.
I watched a group of under-six kids and their parents at a party last weekend like an anthropologist. Amazing what some parents will ignore and when others will intervene. We brought a present for the birthday boy's older sister (long story) that she wasn't very into at the moment. No big deal. We figured it would be a challenging day for her, since her little brother would be the center of attention, plus there were tons of other kids for her to play with. Her parents asked how she liked it, and we shrugged and said she wasn't into it then, but maybe she'd pick it up later. They apologized for her "being a brat." I felt bad for them both and maybe her a little, too, and said she was being six, totally normal, no offense taken.
50
Huh. That's a level of rudeness that my parents would have strongly chastised. I would have been made to give a proper thanks or the toy would be taken away. That would have happened in the moment, and then they would have reprimanded me again after all the guests left.
I dunno. The article is pretty incoherent.
I agree, I don't think she does a good job of connecting the research she's describing. Nor does she list the steps involved in forgiveness (unless I just missed it), after saying that could be the most important part of the findings.
But I still found it an interesting article.
50: But... navigating social pressures and other people's reactions really can be one of the more challenging dynamics in parenting. I mean, your reaction was right and the parents' reaction was wrong, but on the other hand, I feel like if you told the parents their daughter wasn't into your gift and they had just laughed and said, "well, typical 6 year old", there are tons of people who would be offended by that. Apologizing for their daughter's "bad" behavior seems to me to be the more generally socially acceptable reaction. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't, sometimes.
I presumed that the older sister acknowledged the gift and said thank you with eye contact, then put it down to chase after the birthday guests. That'd be fine by me; she doesn't have to pretend it is the most interesting thing in the world when there is a whole party going on.
My kids can be horrible to each other when they're not being lovely. When the two eldest were 9 and 10, they couldn't be left alone in a room for ten seconds before starting to argue. The bickering is so fucking tedious. Now they're teenagers they're mostly out of it, except when the big three all get together and pick on the youngest.
But they will close ranks in the most cliched manner if one of them has been upset or pissed off by someone outside the family.
My brother and I fought physically until he got taller than me. He's 17 months younger than me, and I think he went past me when he was 14. I grew up thinking we were terrible children, my mum was always hissing "wait till I get you home" or similar at us, but I honestly don't think we were that bad. She was just picky.
So, Heebie, basically carry on doing what you are doing, and in about ten years or so, things will probably be better. In that respect. Other things might be worse.
51: It really wasn't bad at all. It could have been, but it seemed pretty OK in context. She was in the middle of playing with the other kids, after being up very late the night before, at a party for her little brother, where we (whom she's hung out with a little but not all that much on balance) gave her a gift she didn't recognize (puck for playing street hockey). If it had been less busy or she were a little older, maybe I'd think differently about it.
52: Completely right. They hear complaints pretty often about her "bratty" behavior, I think. (She's smart and energetic and likes to be the center of attention and stubborn, which some folks find trying.) They looked super relieved we weren't offended.
55: I missed the actual exchange, but I expect it was something along those lines. There was a bit of interaction, then back to play.
But they will close ranks in the most cliched manner if one of them has been upset or pissed off by someone outside the family.
Sally has been heard to say "You don't get to push him around. I get to push him around." to someone giving Newt a hard time.
Sally will have no trouble running her house of giggalos when the time comes.
Is a giggalo the North American version of this?
Hooked on phonics failed me once again.
You were thinking of Juggalos. It's a natural mistake.
I assume Moby means the Pittsburgh version of this.
56
Yeah, if she said an appropriate thanks but didn't play with it at that moment that's fine. Also, the parents made a mistake in asking her if she liked it in front of you. That level of polite social lying should be saved for thoroughly socialized older children, 6 is kind of young to pull it off. They should have modeled fake enthusiasm instead, "my, what a thoughtful gift ydnew gave you. I'm sure you'll enjoy playing hockey with the puck in the future."
My family was also extreme in the N. American context for the level of outward decorum expected from us at young ages.
I would pay thousands for Django Reinhardt's version of "Just a Juggalo"
65: They didn't ask her, just asked us later how it went over. They're very good parents and work hard on manners exactly as you suggest. They just weren't around when she got it to step in and direct her, so she was polite enough for a solo 6 year old with lots going on.
The one I found odder was that some of the older girls were bullying younger boys, and the girls' parents were shrugging it off ("Let 'em fight it out"), which the boys' parents tended towards intervention ("Boys can TOO play on the play atructure. Share nicely."). It was a weird dynamic where everybody seemed to get frustrated. Usually, it seems like the reverse happens, where the pushy/bullying kids' parents intervene.
Aargh!! My 2 daughters have been fighting like crazy since school got out. My system right now is that if I start to her their screaming, I'm kicking them outside for 30 minutes. They can fight outside or do whatever, but I'm sick of hearing their fighting in the house. I think same sex siblings might fight more than mixed ones.
68: IME calisthenics work wonders. Eight count bodybuilders are a good one.
re: 69
My parents used to make me and my sister run laps of our street, which was a big circle, maybe 600 metres around. I remember doing double figure numbers of laps, occasionally.
At that age (10? 12?), I don't even remember getting tired. I could run quite happily for miles while barely getting out of breath.
I listen to all these stories of physical sibling warfare and parents letting them "fight it out so they can learn to work it out*" with fascination. What a foreign world that is. I wonder now if I could've gotten away with punching my siblings if I had just done it so constantly that my parents gave up trying to discipline the behaviour. Somehow I feel like I would've worn out before they did.
(* I would say "people like that need to be smacked" but I guess that would just reinforce their worldview. Shits.)
38-39: In re: forgiveness, the thing about it is that "forgiving" someone is not just about letting people get away with shit. It's a power manoeuvre; it confers the moral high ground on the party doing the forgiving and, done right, reifies the implicit notion that the pardon is an act of magnanimity forestalling far graver consequences. The good news here is that while technically the spirit of forgiveness is meant to be about moving on and unchaining yourself from the perpetrators of abuses against you and healing of the self and letting go of burdens and bitterness, it can also be put to quite vindictive and passive-aggressive uses if you're not into all that.
The one thing I ruthlessly stop is "I don't see why we had to have this sister and we should give her back and find someone else," because I think that is meant to be hurtful and is counterproductive. But mine will hurt each other's feelings and poke at each other and then if I try to separate them insist that no, they need to be right there together. I would prefer there be less meanness, but I'm more focused on their group cohesion and having them repair their relationships after unkindness. (And I do admit I briefly had a "Why you gotta be so rude?" sticker chart last summer just to make to the worst offender aware of just how often she was in that category, but I don't know that it helped.)
Our kids behaved much like Asilon's in 55. And the bickering was, in fact, tedious. A wise friend of ms bill's said that this was a case of "young mammals learning to compete."
As young adults living in different towns, they're apparently in touch a lot and (egad) ask each other for advice on relationships, jobs etc etc. Fingers crossed that the advice makes sense...
I wonder now if I could've gotten away with punching my siblings if I had just done it so constantly that my parents gave up trying to discipline the behaviour
I'm not sure what sort of discipline would have actually stopped us, once we'd started. We mostly fought where my mum didn't see us, and we would only very rarely complain to my mum about each other because we knew we'd both get into trouble. If she investigated or asked what was going on, we would say "nothing". We did get grounded for fighting in the street after we'd gone to the cinema together when we were well into our teens.
Seems ridiculous now. And I've always been zero tolerance about physical fighting with my lot.
I wonder now if I could've gotten away with punching my siblings if I had just done it so constantly that my parents gave up trying to discipline the behaviour
I'm not sure what sort of discipline would have actually stopped us, once we'd started. We mostly fought where my mum didn't see us, and we would only very rarely complain to my mum about each other because we knew we'd both get into trouble. If she investigated or asked what was going on, we would say "nothing". We did get grounded for fighting in the street after we'd gone to the cinema together when we were well into our teens.
Seems ridiculous now. And I've always been zero tolerance about physical fighting with my lot.
For what it's worth, I think the sibling rivalry of Heebie's kids is totally unremarkable.
They're jerks, sure, but not in, like, a SPECIAL way.
The ways they are jerks to adults are a lot more interesting and unique.