Parents need to be growing up here too, don’t they??? Translated…
As my son was in kindergarten, there was this kid who would hit other children endlessly. Once, as I went to pick my son up, there was a gauze on his right cheeks; the teacher accompanied him out, with that apologetic look on her face explained, that that other little boy who’d always hit other kids wanted to play with the toy car my son was playing with, my son wouldn’t let him take the toy, and so, the little boy had, scratched him. The teacher told me, that the parents felt really awful and wanted to go to my house to make an apology personally.
I’d told, that it would be ordinary that kids would hit and rough play with one another, and that there would be injuries from time to time, but that’s just what’s growing up is all about, that I’d asked the teacher to tell the child’s parents, to not keep it on their minds, but the other child’s parents still took him to our house and made the apologies personally, bringing along a present too. But this meeting for the kids became meeting of two new friends, the kids were having a blast, when the adults were saying their goodbyes, the kids are unwilling to be separated from one another still, and made the agreement, that they were to, play together again the very next day. Later on, the two kids became the best of friends, and would be with one another every single day, until school’s out, then, they’d unwillingly, parted ways.
And, my son’s scar from the scratch is still visible on his face, twenty-one years later, it’d become, this light thin line now, it’d become like a childhood memory he had with his best friend from his childhood year. What reminded me of this event was, seeing or hearing of how a lot of parents would become, overly protective of their own young.
Because their children had gone a bit too far in playing, had been hurt, or gotten hit a little too hard, the parents would, head to the schools angrily, and demanded an explanation, even threatened to go public to the press about it, to sue in court. On the playgrounds, the younger children, in order to fight to get the swings, had, pushed another kid, the kid who was pushed started crying, and the parents of the crying kid started blaming the parent of the pusher, for not keeping their own young more disciplined; when the children played in the sandbox in our community, there would be incidents where someone had, splashed some sand into another child’s eyes, and, the child would run fast to her/his parents, to tattle tell, to accuse………
A lot of spoiled children are already used to “reporting” to the parents everything that goes on in their lives, especially when they feel taken, they’d totally ask for the parents’ assistance, begged them for affection, begged, for “revenge” for the young. I’d missed that older time, of how we’d dried up our own tears after we’d lost in the games of cowboys and Indians, and started practicing the tactics, to win the next time; and when we couldn’t get our seats on the swings, we’d played a little mind games, to get the seats from our best friends; when our playmates had, splashed sand into our eyes, kept our heads lowered, walked to the sinks, and rinse it out on our own, and gotten all wet, and, as we’d arrived home and our moms started grilling us about getting so wet, and we still wouldn’t tell them, how we’d gotten ourselves so wet.
When the children’s every single word, every single move is under the parents’ watchful eyes and surveillances, they wouldn’t allow the kids to have the minutest adventures, a small bit of hurt, and, in the process of connect to others, the process became twisted, and, what’s lost, is the ability to learn to get along, and the funs had in play.
And so, this shows how as parents, we all tend to become a bit OVER protective of our own young, and when our kid gets hurt, we’d wanted to go at the other child who’d hurt our own offspring’s throats, and what, does that teach the young? Oh yeah, so long as they are crying to us, we, the adults would, GET justice back FOR them? That’s the WRONG kinds of values to teach the children, after all, children ARE supposed to misbehave, otherwise, how can they learn what’s acceptable and what’s not?