I overhear this conversation between a child and his father.
Child: “Hey, Dad, what does ‘misanthropic’ mean?”
Father: “It means someone who likes dogs more than humans.”
Child: “…Huh. I guess I’m misanthropic?”
Father: “Most people are, son. Most people are.”
When we are out walking with our four-year-old son, we sometimes encounter an older gentleman in the area. He hasn’t done anything specific that would be cause for alerting authorities, but he gives us a very bad feeling.
The first time we noticed him was when our son was not yet walking but aware of the world around him. The man came up as he was walking in the opposite direction.
Man: “Oh, what a cute little boy! You are so cute!”
At first, we didn’t think much of it other than being a bit awkward as we aren’t very socially outward. But the man kept mentioning our son’s cuteness, to our son, without ever looking in our direction. I tried to think positively, that it was my social difficulties that made a bad feeling about this man grow, and I tried to calm down and smile. However, once I noticed that my son looked terrified, we firmly walked away.
This kept happening. We avoided eye contact and didn’t slow down our walk, yet the man always took whatever seconds he managed to get to talk to our son, even to the point where my husband told him to stop. He didn’t; it was as if we didn’t exist. He never followed us or anything; it was only that creepy behaviour when we happened to walk past each other.
Since then, our son has forgotten his first fright of the man, but he does notice that we don’t like to linger when approached by that man specifically. On an unrelated note, but relevant to the story, this man was not of Scandinavian ethnicity looks-wise.
One day, my son came home from kindergarten.
Son: “Mom, we are bad people.”
Me: “Really? Why?”
Son: “It is bad to avoid someone with darker skin.”
At first, I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but once I understood he meant that man, I explained to him that, yes, you shouldn’t avoid people because they have darker skin, but that we avoided him because he had scared him when he was little and given Mommy and Daddy bad feelings about it. Since we have friends of different ethnicities, even family members, he seemed to understand that we only avoided that man, not dark-skinned people in general.
Of course, we used much simpler terms, but I tried to explain the difference between avoiding someone with dark skin and avoiding someone BECAUSE they have dark skin.
Later, there was a reminder to all parents sent from kindergarten about their policy that they didn’t accept any discrimination of any kind, among some other policies they mentioned. We did not think much of it until we had a meeting with one of the teachers.
Teacher: “I must say, I am worried about what your son is learning. He has told us that you avoid dark-skinned people because they give us bad feelings.”
Husband: “What? That’s not true!”
Teacher: “Look. I need to remind you that we do not accept discrimination here. Your son has several friends of different ethnicities, and that is a good thing.”
Me: “Is this about that man? My son thought we avoided a man because he had dark skin. Did he get that from kindergarten?”
Teacher: “We teach the children not to discriminate…”
Me: “And so do we.”
Teacher: “Then why are you teaching him to avoid a person with dark skin?”
Me: “We avoid that man because he scared our son on several occasions when he was younger and doesn’t listen when we tell him off.”
Husband: “Why would he think it is because of his skin? I don’t even know why he would get that idea?”
The teacher grew quiet for a moment and then excused herself to make a phone call. Coming back, she explained that there had been a misunderstanding. Apparently, our son mentioned the man once after we had met him, and one of the teachers had asked what he looked like. Then, when our son proceeded to say that we always avoid him, she jumped to the conclusion that we were racists and then had a talk with all the children about how it is bad to avoid someone just because of their skin colour. Unfortunately for our four-year-old, he didn’t quite grasp all the reasoning and took that as us being bad people.
We never found out which teacher it was, and I am sure she had noble intentions. But next time, I hope she talks to us before teaching our son that he is a bad person.
My husband and I have a son who is about to turn four, and we have a baby girl on the way.
As a baby, my son developed a severe allergy to diapers. He’d get awful rashes that took way too long to get better, and nothing we did helped much. Because of that, my husband and I decided to start potty training a bit early, right before he was eighteen months old. We talked to his pediatrician and relied on cloth diapers as much as we could. After a few months of that, he’d almost grown out of his allergy, but we kept going.
Today, he’s fully potty trained. He has some (very) rare accidents, but only when he tries to delay his bathroom trips for too long. When that happens, we wash him up and replace his underwear.
My husband’s mother was firmly against our decision to potty train our son early. She insisted that it would lead to IBS and that he should wear diapers until he was at least three. She tried to convince us to change our minds for months, but we held our ground.
In early December, I had a doctor’s appointment while my husband was at work, so I left our son with [Mother-In-Law] for a couple of hours. Sometime later, she called me and said [Son]’d had a (bathroom) accident. He hadn’t had one in months. I instructed her on how to proceed, as well as where to find the spare clothes I’d packed for him.
I picked [Son] up about an hour later. On our way home, he complained about being “itchy”. I didn’t know why until I got him ready for bathtime later that night. He was wearing a diaper. (It was clean.)
He didn’t get any rashes, but the diaper was a couple of sizes too small, and he hadn’t worn one in a long time, so I think that’s where the itchiness came from. When I asked him about it, he confirmed that [Mother-In-Law] had said he was “still a baby” and put him in the diaper.
When my husband and I confronted her about it, she defended herself by saying his accident was clear proof we’d made a mistake by potty training him early, and he should go back to wearing diapers for the time being. At no point did she apologize.
We decided that [Mother-In-Law] was forbidden from babysitting, as well as from spending time with our son unsupervised. She is not our only babysitting option; my mom and stepdad, my sister, my brother-in-law, and my best friend also babysit. [Mother-In-Law] didn’t think we were serious until we went to her place on Saturday. We had to go to the hospital, and rather than leaving our son with her, we took him with us.
Now that she knew we were serious, she started calling us dramatic and ungrateful, as well as claiming that we were alienating her from her grandchildren out of stubbornness. She maintained that she was right about early potty training being a bad idea and that she was only trying to help us.
I didn’t think we were in the wrong, but this did feel a bit dramatic. My brother-in-law, who was skeptical of our decision back in the day, thought we were right to be angry but it was still an overreaction to revoke [Mother-In-Law]’s permission to babysit our son.
For a while after the diaper incident, I’d been wondering where [Mother-In-Law] had gotten the diaper from. When I asked her about it, she told me it was a leftover from when my son was younger. As much as I didn’t think that was true, it did make some sense, and she swore by it. When I asked my son back in December, he just told me she had the diaper.
After I posted about it online in early January, some people reached out to me with theories about that. I talked to my husband about them, and later that week, we decided to confront [Mother-In-Law] again. We did it over the phone after our son went to bed.
This time, she decided she wanted to “come clean” — her exact words. She admitted that the diaper wasn’t a leftover, but rather a new one she bought right after [Son]’s accident.
To clarify: rather than obey my instructions and change my son into his spare clothes, [Mother-In-Law] left him alone in her bathtub while she went to the pharmacy near her house and bought diapers. She left my three-year-old alone in her house for ten whole minutes because she wanted to prove a point.
She claimed what she did was fine because the bathtub was empty and she’d locked the bathroom door. She also said [Son] was crying when she got home, and she “comforted” him by saying it would make my husband and me happy to see him in a diaper.
And then, she had the nerve to say that it was “good to get this off her chest” and that we could finally move on from this.
Needless to say, the word “outraged” doesn’t even begin to cover how we were feeling. My husband yelled at [Mother-In-Law] for over half an hour before hanging up the phone.
My husband and I talked to [Son] about it, and he said he didn’t tell us anything because he didn’t want us to be mad at him. We managed to reassure him that he’d done nothing wrong. We promised him that he’s a big boy, and he’ll never wear a diaper again.
[Mother-In-Law] called us several times over the weekend. She gave us dozens of excuses, ranging from “I couldn’t find his underwear” (I clearly remember her announcing she had it when she called me that day) to “I left my sons home alone all the time when they were younger” (my husband had no idea).
We lost whatever patience we had that day. We decided that [Mother-In-Law] won’t be allowed near our family for the next six months. If she doesn’t improve her behavior until then, that will become permanent. She’s also uninvited from [Son]’s fourth birthday party next month and won’t be allowed to see our daughter at the hospital when she’s born (I’m due in May).
We sent her a text with the above before blocking her. Even if she does change, she’ll never be allowed to babysit our kids again. We have other people who can take care of them on occasion.
The first job I ever had was working as a counselor at a riding camp at the local barn. I knew the barn owner and everyone there and would get paid in free riding lessons. Some of the kids could be difficult, but for the most part, they were easy enough to deal with.
We used to partner with a sleepaway camp; they would come once a week and we would give their kids riding lessons. It was really annoying to deal with because we also had to watch our campers who were bored and wanted to go ride. But whatever, we all understood why the deal was in place, so we did it without complaint.
The problem ended up being the sleepaway camp’s owner’s daughter, who would come ride with the rest of the camp. This child was a literal nightmare. She would bang her doll on the stalls and scare the horses, even when we asked her to stop. She was eight and old enough to know better.
[Camp Owner’s Daughter] also thought she was way more advanced than she was. She would often not listen to the trainers in her lessons and try to make the horse canter, even though she still couldn’t walk the horse by herself. As such, we always put her on Doran, who was an older gelding and could basically teach the lesson himself. He was the only horse we could trust not to do anything when [Camp Owner’s Daughter] kicked him. She was not happy with us.
Camp Owner’s Daughter: “I don’t want to ride Doran! He’s boring! I want to ride Dorito!”
Me: “The trainers are in charge of who rides who, so if you really want to, you could talk to them about it. Also, Doran is awesome! I love riding him!”
Camp Owner’s Daughter: “If you don’t put me on Dorito, I’ll tell my mom you hit me!”
Me: “…I’ll see what I can do.”
I was about fourteen and didn’t really know what to do, so I went and told [Barn Owner] and the trainers about what [Camp Owner’s Daughter] had said. They must have worked something out because [Camp Owner’s Daughter] did end up riding Doran and the camp was not invited back.
Related:
Some People Have Never Been Told “No” And It Shows, Part 11
Some People Have Never Been Told “No” And It Shows, Part 10
Some People Have Never Been Told “No” And It Shows, Part 9
Some People Have Never Been Told “No” And It Shows, Part 8
Some People Have Never Been Told “No” And It Shows, Part 7
Back in high school, I remember learning to make a circuit with wires, a battery, and a tiny lightbulb. The really smart kids also added a switch and learned how it connected and disconnected the circuit.
Present day, my fourteen-year-old turns to me and asks.
Kid: “Do you want to see my homework?”
Me: “Sure.”
They pull out all these wires and three little coloured lights — red, yellow, and green — and proceed to construct something. They’re connecting alligator clips and troubleshooting which bulbs need to be replaced. Finally, they have the whole thing put together.
Me: “Is this for an electrical class or something?”
Kid: “No. It’s for coding.”
And then they plug it into their computer and open up a program they wrote. I stare in wonder as the lights flash on and off. Red. Green. Yellow.
Kid: “That’s not right; these two are mixed up.”
They then reassemble it so they light up red, then yellow, and then green, muttering to themself as they go.
Me: “Hey, even with the signals being switched, that is still really impressive.”
Kid: “What? I haven’t started yet. This program just tests that I wired it properly. Here is my coding homework.”
And then the lights started flashing in a pattern with alternating speeds. I stood there with my mind blown, remembering my school days with the lightbulb, battery, and switch.
Kids these days.
