are MOST kids raised as super-indulged noisy brats these days?

Did you ever actually feel bad or learn anything from being SENT TO YOU ROOM? I grew up hearing about it on TV and from friends but I thought it was a colossal joke. Did people actually get sent to their rooms?

Then when I become an adult I go and make barfstyle.mov

Yeah I'm a real authority

-- LeCoq

I got sent to my room. I occasionally also send my daughter to her room when she's being a brat - so yes, it still goes on. It's really a time out thing. It doesn't really work is my impression, but it does give you some time to recover your wits.

But, yeah, kids these days, eh?

That said, I do think the no-discipline thing is somewhat pegged to the amount of money the parents have and how urban they are -- in otehr words, I wouldn't say "MOST kids," even if it does seem to be a bit of a trend. We can probably rest assured that plenty of kids are getting screamed at this very minute -- and, sadly enough, plenty of them getting the crap beat out of them for not even really doing anything.

The parents are selfish yuppies who feel entitled to go to a movie/dinner/etc., a sick or cranky kid is not going to stand in their way.

As long as you don't blindfold them and throw them down the stairs -- if you do that you end up having children who grow up to start stupid threads.

There is a certain demographic, though, that's just weirdly indulgent about children, and seemingly can't bear the thought of doing anything unpleasant to their beautiful kids, physical or not. And that seems untenable: at the very least you have to find a way of letting children know when you're mad at them. You owe it to them as human beings, really, because they're going to need to learn how to have relationships who'll respond to their behavior in kind -- i.e., people who'll be dicks to them if they act like brats. If you don't get that in there, you wind up with this weird sort of young-adult whose idea of human relationships is really just about gaming people to get what they want -- they same way they grew up gaming their parents, who were always too indulgent and eager to be liked to demonstrate to them that other people's feelings can and will matter too.

I've worked with children for several years, often with families who are more likely than most to use physical punishment at the slightest provocation. The idea that you can love your children too much or be too protective of them doesn't have any scientific basis. There's no evidence to suggest that you can "spoil" children in the way that people still apparently believe. There's a good deal of evidence to suggest that the biggest part of your adult personality is inherited genetically from your parents, not learned.

Of course if you're angry you need to communicate that to your kids, but it's no different to dealing with adults - bawling them out might make you feel better, but it isn't a good way of dealing with a situation. I do way too much bawling, and I generally feel shitty after I'm done.

jokes

How could it? You can't follow a cossetted kid around till late adulthood to see if it ends up going to ecstacy+cuddle parties for grown ass people and crying over shit like internet musical taste disses!

Well here's an essay by Judith Rich Harris for a start. There's been an awful lot of work done on child development over the last 100-odd years. A lot of it is contentious/contended like any scientific research, but it's a bit more rigorous than anecdotal guesswork.

(And if you're joking, fine, I just get hissy about this shit cos of the work I've done.)

I do draw the line at murdering the kid. That seems excessive to me.

Wimp. I thought Aussies were tough.

you have no idea how unnecessarily proud young couples are of their kids in some areas when all they did was fuck and not ever learn how to discipline the kid

and this:

To all the parents who drag their kids to the mall/movies/restaurant when they are *clearly* not old enough to sit still. Or if they're sick. Or if you can't get a babysitter. STAY THE FUCK HOME with your kids. Make the goddamn sacrifice. It's not the kids' fault if they're cranky and crying at 9:30 at night. It's the clear-headed parents who refuse to stay home.

i've said it before and i'll keep fucking saying it: you need a licence to own a dog. but not to spawn a child. fucking hell, you soi-disant parents, you ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANOTHER LIFE. is it too much to expect you to actually GET INVOLVED AND TAKE AN INTEREST?

a few weeks back, at a wedding, i sat opposite a horrific couple, with their snotty little three-year-old brat, theo. at one point his godawful mother actually did say: "we don't want to stifle his creativity." this was while the kid was stuffing all the chocolate favours in his mouth.

and you know what? he'll grow up to fucking hate them too. (his parents, that is. not chocolate favours.)

I can't stand when parents let their small children (younger than 5 or 6 I suppose) walk in shopping malls. Children should be held firmly by the hand and kept close by, otherwise carried or put in a stroller. It is increasingly common for toddlers to be allowed to stumble around like tiny, disoriented alcoholics, metres from the parents and completely outside their field of vision. It is impossible to give these children a wide enough berth. They always find a way to stagger cluelessly in my direction, invariably hitting their heads on my knee. Just out looking for a lawsuit, I suppose, much like their parents.

And it may just be me being hopeful, but I get the impression that the only reason MTV doesn't mock these spoiled princesses more is because they'd stop wanting to be on the show. Though that can't be true. It'd be more tolerable if there were some ruthless smartass comment bubbles a la Blind Date.

i don't think anybody has said this at all. i can be in a restaurant surrounded by kids and i won't notice ... until one of them starts acting up/screaming/running up and down/all of the above. very often when this happens, the parents will do nothing at all.

it's like theo at the wedding: reaching over to other people's food and taking it. what do you do? you can't say, hoy, kid, put that the fuck back. you just sit there gobsmacked, thinking: i can't believe his parents are letting him get away with this.

FWIW, theo also screamed and shouted throughout the (very small and low-key) ceremony itself. call me old-fashioned, but if he'd been mine, i'd have taken him outside rather than fuck up someone else's big day. for fuxxake, you couldn't even hear the readings.

parents like that make me spit. and, sadly, i seem to be seeing more of them ... but maybe i'm just getting crankier. i don't know.

xpost: there is no excuse for hitting children at all.

[Cam'ron:] Hey Yo Shorty Wuts Going On Wuts Popin'
[Girl:] oh shit wut up killa wuts going on
[Cam'ron:] Hey Yo I'm trying to go out of town U tryin' to go wit me
[Girl:] how long U goin' 4
[Cam'ron:] look man that shit dont matter, wut U gonna do? U comin' or not
[Girl:] well I got my kids killa, wuts up wut about my kids
[Cam'ron:] Man FUCK your kids man, U comin' or not?
[Girl:] *giggles* Yea I'm comin'
[Cam'ron:] K get in bitch
[Girl:] Yeah they grandmama can watch them

Or, as Hollywood Squares great Paul Lynde once drunkenly told an inert mom on a plane, "If you can't corral this kid -- I'm gonna fuck her!"

Of course, then there are those parents who are genuinely neglectful.

i'm very unimpressed by mooks who say things like "we don't want to stifle his creativity" as their bawling brat wails at the top of his lungs through someone else's entire wedding ceremony. surely better to be "bad daddy" than "that useless toss who couldn't raise a child if his life depended on it"?

parents today seem to be so easily manipulated, it's sad. what worries me is wtf is gonna happen when these little shits grow up?? are they gonna beat eachother senseless? are they gonna be more litigious? they're all being trained to cry for whatever they want, are told they are god's gift to man, pampered by parents and grandparents alike, conditioned to believe they do no wrong and that other people don't matter. god help us.

oh, and btw i hate children, but mostly i hate their parents.

In a world where you can't criticize the disgustingly obese or filthy smokers without being labelled a Nazi, thank god you can still speak the truth about the horrid infant plague.

My frustration with kids in public is split evenly between the little brats themselves and the parents. If it's a baby crying at a midnight screening of Kill Bill (f'real), parent's fault. If it's a nine-year old kicking a dog, kid's fault.

That said, I was at a party with quite a few retired teachers this weekend, and they all noticed a definite change in parental attitudes over the years with a lot of "My child is right and you the teacher are WRONG" which is not really gonna help the kid in the long run.

They're growing ffs, they need wholesome fruit, veg, grains and meats. They need real food, and plenty of it. When I was a kid, ANY junk like McDs, KFC etc was a rare treat. The only thing I ate daily was lollies and that was only really in high school. As a young child we lived on fresh food and I was always full of energy, fit and clear skinned.

Restaurants were a few times a year treat until we were old enough to behave normally in one. Bedtimes were strictly by 8pm.

Im quite sure many parents still do this, I mean its just common sense, but there has to be many that dont, and if I see another kid of age four or five sayin "fuck off cunt" in public again I'll despair for humanity.

I'm going with the former. It's not difficult to tell which adults were never taught the value of 'no,' or given any kind of criticism as children or ever taught that they weren't the BRIGHTEST SHININGEST STAR OF ALL THE NIGHT SKY. Spoiled brat kids become spoiled brat adults.

Whereas my child phobia just means that I don't interact with children and toddlers unless absolutely forced to do so - thereby not aiding in the creation of a new generation of fuckheads.

Ha ha, that took me a minute. I think I might change my name!

As an only child (and as the parent of a most-likely only child) I get really annoyed at all of the old "spoiled only child" stereotyping. I may be oversensitive but when you're an only child you hear a lot of that kind of shit over the years. I could just as easily overgeneralize about attention-starved children from big families who act out in public because their parents don't spend enough time with them, but I won't do that.

They treated us more like equals than most parents, I think

Exactly. My parents did the same with me and I think that goes a long way toward teaching children how to behave in public.

it's interesting that this thread should crop up, because this weekend, while in ohio, i had kids literally run into me, like WHAMMO-style, four times -- and i received no sorry, they received no reprimand from their parents, no nothing. there was also the five-year-old girl on the shuttle bus who stared at me for five minutes, then whined 'can iii sit dowwwwn?' no please, no nothing. i gave up the seat and she took it and only muttered 'thank you' when her grandmother prompted her to. it seriously drove me nuts.

But my mother raised me right.

Exactly. My parents did the same with me and I think that goes a long way toward teaching children how to behave in public.

Yes! Though, not equals as in a decision-making partner on a level with the parents, but equals as in someone who is not to be baby-talked to, not to be condescended to, and whose opinions matter, even though they don't get the final vote.

I appreciate Nabisco's point that parents can let you know you've made them angry or offended or hurt their feelings, that maybe they SHOULD withdraw and be cold and pissy for a while so you see the natural social consequences, but for my mother that was too close to withholding affection based on whether we pleased her in the moment. She wanted us to know that we were always loved even when our behavior was unacceptable.

And I think people are all touching on the causes of the bratty behavior discussed here, it seems to me that brats result when we (collectively in our society) think that the world exists FOR CHILDREN and not for everyone. We keep trying to child-proof every aspect of things and it's just not meant to be -- because children know they're being lied/condescended to, for starters, and also because what are they supposed to do when we take away the kinds of social intercourse and knowledge/priviliges that should mark their transition into adulthood? There's no incentive for them to mature and take their places among other adults as thinking, contributing, socially minded creatures because we haven't demonstrated that there's a grown-up future to aspire to. I have the impression that this phenomenon is a lot less present in European culture, but we're kind of weird about childhood here in the States, possibly stemming from the popular conception of what childhood is/should be. Thank the Puritans and Elsie Dinsmore and Hollywood & Shirley Temple, I think at least in part, and lots of other things I don't know much about.

...and yes!

too much junk food is being fed to these kids. Teeny you will clearly make an excellent parent!

Totally arbitrary.

I'm very worried about how I will treat my children. I want to do good. Never spank. Never be unreasonably angry. But I've seen what some kids can do, like my cousin who's a nasty kid at times, so I hope my child isn't like that. It's not always the parent's fault, sometimes you just have mean little kids who can't be disciplined.

it was so good you read it twice!

my mum devoted her entire working life to children. she loves them. she says there is one word that all parents need to remember: BOUNDARIES. that would seem to me to be the key.

but hey, what do i know? i'm just selfish scum who's reluctant to bring a child into a dreadful, shitty world too busy whooping it up to spare a thought for all those poor, hard-pressed parents who made a decision they should be able to see through were forced at gunpoint to have kids. obviously, i can't comment on anything at all. silly me.

Kids can be really funny. Although I'm not saying that's a reason to get one.

When kids are around adults, they can't engage in adult conversation, so obviously they want to do something they consider more fun. And if there's nothing fun to do, they'll be a pain. In which case their parents should a) give them something to do or b) be able to get them to stay calm and quiet without much entertainment.

That's different from a kid, say, throwing their food all over you and the parents going "well, isn't that sweeeeet he's just expreeeessing himSELF".

This is why we had cable disconnected when our daughter was born, so she could learn how to occupy herself with a book (or god forbid, her own thoughts) without having to have a constant input-stream from a yammering television. I think turning off the TV is just as important as no junk food.

My righteous sentiment exactly. Child-free subway cars, please.

And Rock Hardy, you are a god.

Of course, my mum's pretty scary when she wants to be, having taught at and then ran an all-boys high school for 15 years or so.

At the risk of being boring, my kids are 1) like adults with other adults, and 2) like kids when with other kids. You'd like them.

and by the same token probably wouldn't notice if you'd bundled him into your car and nicked off with him. jesus wept, why do these people have children?

without wishing to turn this into a mutual-OTM-ing session, zoe's last two posts are absolutely dead-on, and i could not agree more.

yes but by the same token nobody would want to nick off with those kids cos they're HORRIBLE SCREAMING CHILDREN!

still, fuck it. it's a good story anyway.

No, they probably realized the silliness of spanking. The kid only knows that the parents doesn't like what he/she did, not *why* it shouldn't be done, when a parent spanks. It's the physical equivalent of saying "I don't want you do to do this because I tell you so."

Yes, I'm being naive when it comes to parenting. ;-)

Yeah that's true...I've got a nephew of my own (but he really is a little angel, so that's ok). I was thinking more of kids misbehaving in public places, restaurants and the like.

haha, ken, you're still not logged out.

my nephew (now six) used to be very wary of me (i think it was the sideburns) and obeyed my every word. it was great; i could go: "NOT NOW, JAMES" and he'd shut up quickly.

at some point in the past six months i've gone (in his eyes) from being scary miserable uncle who hates kids to fun uncle who can be punched in the bolls really hard. "NOT NOW, JAMES" just elicits squeals and more boll-punching.

problem is: in my eyes i'm still scary miserable uncle who hates kids :)

talking of patronising: theo's dad (at the wedding) was trying to talk to the (slightly precocious, but in a cool way) ten-year-old bridesmaid about music. "AND WHAT DO YOU LIKE?" he said, all smarmy. "WESTLIFE? BOYZONE? THEY'RE EVER SO GOOD, AREN'T THEY?"

"actually, i like METAL," she said.

hah, pwned.

this is a brilliant idea.

ie he thinks: "christ, uncle simon is friends with a big chumper like stet? the mook. i'm gonna punch him in the bolls."

p.s. before anyone gets an impression of me as some kind of kid beater!! I love kids!!!!! (and not in that way!!!) i'd totally reason the hell out of the kids and then they make me loads of cash when they realise that being able to curl a football into a goal is a good thing and will get them loads of girls at some point of their lives.

I've only read half the thread so far but I think this:

Yeah, come on parents! Don't you know that once you have a child you are supposed to stay indoors? Here I am trying to live my fabulous urban yuppie lifestyle and I certainly don't want to see any people under the age of 18 out in public. The very sight of your baby in my restaurant ruins my entire evening and distracts my friends and I from our loud, drunken guffawing.

Is pretty much OTM.

For all you nay sayers - go down to Stevenage town centre on a Saturday afternoon (actually no, don't) and see for yourselves how much hatred a lot of kids have for their children. Swearing, hitting, slapping, general "CAM 'ERE YA LI'L SHIT" vitriol, all because kids are just being kids.

The other day I heard a woman coming out of Tescos scolding her son (the actual words were "you're going to drop the fucking thing in a minute") because he was holding a shopping bag in a way she didn't like.

Fair dos - it's almost as bad seeing some ice-cream gorged little runt running around Tangoing everyone in the face while their owners just look on with delight, but I'd dare say it's not as bad as those kids who get punished day-in day-out simply for acting like children (i.e. playing, running around, getting bored, wanting attention, and yes crying - we all did it).

OWNERS!

also, was this just a typo or a deliberate thing about teenage parents? please say yes because the "kids are just being kids" bit suddenly then becomes really deep. like "omg but the parents are just kids being kids too oh no!!"

football curled in the net, a biscuit. shouting, dissent, no buscuit. taking off your top, no buscuit. raising a hand = go to your room, plus no buscuit for the week.

This is so wrong! 90% of the time the kid will know exactly what they did wrong, whether it's jumping in the flowerbed or hitting their little brother or whatever. The discipline helps them associate bad/malicious behaviour with punishment, smacking, sending to the bedroom or whatever form that discipline takes.

I accept there are parents who smack their kids for almost anything (and also ones who punish *genuine accidents* like spilling a drink or something in this way, which I agree is wrong and destructive) but I'm certain that they're a small minority.

omg mark your kids will grow up so fucked up.

The key to disciplining children, whether it be spanking or time-outs or whatever, is discussing with your child DIRECTLY after the punishment (or, in cases of older kids you can ground, during the punishment) WHY what they did was punishable. And, most importantly, present them with possible other ways out of the same scenario that they might not have been punished for.

xposts with kens posts aplenty

yes, exactly. but why does that punishment have to involve smacking? children can - and should - be reasoned with, eg: you've been bad, so you must go and sit on the naughty step (nb: we had a naughty step back in 1979)/you can't go out to play/whatever. smacking is surely the sign of an absence of reason, of an instinctive reaction; do you really want your kids growing up feeling that lashing out is an acceptable instinctive response?

That said, I'm pretty sure that a lot of the bullies from my school (the posher ones) didn't get smacked at all.

heheh, good point.

so it should be some kind of reasoned cruelty that benefits you at their expense. (but because they're your kids explain to them why you slipped poison in their coffee after they've signed all their money to you, obv)

Err... sorry to be pedantic but - no it isn't.

although you really ought to leave teaching the really crafty stuff until later on just so that they have less time to use it on you.

Well for a kid growing up it is. every day they get older they're more on their own

Duct tape would work just as well as a swat, really.

I think alot of people in the area they live in let their children run free without discipline because they feel guilty about leaving their kids in day care/school from 6am to 7pm every damn day. I think I would find it hard to dump my kid off, drive a long ass commute there and back, pick him up and then look him in the face and say no or punish him for something no matter how wrong. It's doing them more harm than good in the long run but I see the logic.

My mom always ruled by fear. She never hit me, but she knew how to throw a shoe just right that it would miss me. I used to think she had bad aim, but now I suspect she didn't. I don't know if I'd use that tactic with my kids but it sure kept my ass in line.

Yes, except I was 99% joking. I never taped up my kid — there were times when her tantrum led her to do something destructive, and I would hold on to her and prevent her from it. Again, it's a matter of making them realize they're not the boss and they're about to be punished for going past established limits (i.e., forgetting who the boss really is).

fwiw, the kind of behavior that Grimly describes really annoys me too--teaching a kid some manners does not equal "stifling his creativity". Then again, I don't feel comfortable around most kids-- I'm not a parent, nor would I have any idea how to go about disciplining children, but I've definitely seen the difference well-defined boundaries and fair discipline can make to a kid's behavior.

Disagree completely (or is that sarcasm?). If Nanny 911 has taught me anything - and it has - it's that letting a kid do whatever s/he wants is a recipe for disaster. Seems to me that a little discipline early on saves the parents a world of hurt.

(My daughter's turning 1 next week, and getting to the point that she knows what she's doing, so lately I have been obsessing over the first time we have to punish her.)