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metaphortunate son ([personal profile] metaphortunate) wrote2015-01-02 09:25 pm

Facts About Whales

Question for those of you who were once children:

Did your parents or other appropriate caregivers, if any, give you any guidance on wading into the shark-infested waters of childhood socializing?

I can remember about 30 bajillion instances of my parents, mostly my long-suffering mother, hissing at me to say hello to the adults of the house when we showed up, thank you when we got food, goodbye when we left, excuse me when I ran right in front of their feet as kids do, sorry for spilling things all over the carpet, etc. x infinity; but I can't remember them talking much about how to be with other kids. Maybe I have a faint memory of being told to say "Thank you" for presents at a birthday party? When getting into my teens I definitely remember being told not to let anyone pressure me into anything, which was good advice. That's about it.

And it's not because I was the suave little kid who didn't need any help. I was the kind of insufferable fat bespectacled nerdlette who would show up at your party toting a book called Facts About Whales. Seriously, that was my favorite book and for ages I carried it everywhere. Because I have always been committed to popularity. I am 40 years old and when I go home my parents' friends still laugh at me because I was the dork who always showed up at their house carrying some sort of nerdtacular book. And then would sit in the corner reading it while other kids played around me. And if my parents had somehow prevented me from bringing a book, I would FIND a book at the house we were at and read it while other kids played around me.

And yet, I don't remember my parents ever bugging me about it much. Maybe because reading was Officially Educational and they never stopped me doing anything Officially Educational? Maybe because, to do justice to my tiny nerdly social acumen, I had already worked out that nobody wanted to hear about any Facts About Whales, so at least it kept me quiet? I don't know, but I do know that they were totally right not to bug me: I made friends when I found people I actually liked, and I'm doing fine now. So, huh.

But I have no idea what I'll do if & when my kids struggle.
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[personal profile] copracat 2015-01-03 06:17 am (UTC)(link)
My parents regularly told me to get my 'nose out of a book' but, amiable a child as I was, giving up reading was my hard line. They gave no advice on socialising with other children, but like yours, were very instructional on how to behave to adults. My parents actually said, "Children should be seen and not heard" on more than one occasion.

Edited to add: If you had shown up to my house with a copy of 'Facts About Whales' I can assure you we would have been fast friends in about five seconds flat. Or at least we would both have our noses in it. I may have tried to interest you in my encyclopaedia.
Edited 2015-01-03 06:25 (UTC)
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[personal profile] jedusaur 2015-01-03 06:47 am (UTC)(link)
Mom would call me on my shit if I was mean to a friend in front of her, but mostly I don't remember her intervening much. I never had much trouble making friends, though. Keeping them, yeah, but that was no problem because I could always make new ones.
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[personal profile] jedusaur 2015-01-04 04:12 am (UTC)(link)
I'm better at hanging onto people these days, but the shortlist of two or three people I e-mail when I'm having a rough time or text everyday minutiae still rotates every few months.
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[personal profile] quartzpebble 2015-01-03 07:34 am (UTC)(link)
They didn't, and I wish they had (been able to?) in a way I could understand. I basically didn't have friends till I was ten or eleven (finally, a nerd/weirdo group!) and while I was often content with my books, I didn't really understand socializing with peers for a long time. I ended up learning a lot about How To People in my 20s. I don't think it was good for me to have my effective social skills mostly limited to settings with an inherent power dynamic (adult/kid) for awhile there.
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[personal profile] commodorified 2015-01-03 10:13 am (UTC)(link)
I got endless advice and it was pretty much all TERRIBLE. Like, "well, stop ANNOYING them!" When I was being bullied levels of terrible.

I think on the whole something like Captain Awkward's advice to socially awkward people, adjusted for age, is apt to work out much better. Like, "tell them about stuff you like and remember to ask them or let them talk about stuff they like, too, and you'll probably find things to talk about" or "not everyone will like you and you won't like everyone and that's okay, even though it can hurt. Just don't be mean to people just because you don't like them or put up with people who dislike you being mean to you."
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[personal profile] hunningham 2015-01-03 10:17 am (UTC)(link)
I was also this child, and yes, I used to take a book to other children's birthday parties (or find one).

And like yourself, no advice or training from parents about how to socialise with other children. But I think this might have been a certain blindness - I don't think my mother saw me interact with my peers outside family or thought about it - if she realised how not-good my social skills were, she would have said so.
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[personal profile] antisoppist 2015-01-03 03:27 pm (UTC)(link)
My mother had trained as a teacher. When other kids started teasing me when I was nine I found her copy of The Normal Child and started mapping out diagrams of power dynamics and friendship networks. This anthropological approach to my classmates didn't really help me make friends either.
hunningham: Beautiful colourful pears (Default)

[personal profile] hunningham 2015-01-03 07:27 pm (UTC)(link)
Meep! People are really complicated aren't they? And a book which explains people and how they interact should be helpful, but in reality...
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[personal profile] laurashapiro 2015-01-03 03:04 pm (UTC)(link)
I don't remember a lot of parental guidance when it came to my socializing with other kids, until my folks became aware that I was being bullied. Their involvement ranged from incorrect/unhelpful ("they're just jealous of how smart you are" or "just ignore them and eventually they'll stop") to disastrous, when they held a meeting with me, the chief bully, her parents and the school principal. I barely survived that year.

I am glad that there's a lot more awareness of bullying now and a lot of people writing on it -- there are resources and whole organizations dedicated to helping solve that particular issue.
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[personal profile] laurashapiro 2015-01-04 03:40 pm (UTC)(link)
So I see. I can't help but wonder if humans have learned anything since then.

The one thing that would have really helped me is if an adult had ever, even once, said to me "children are cruel on purpose just because they feel like it, and there is nothing you can do about it." So many of my tears were shed over WHY they were being so mean to me and trying to figure out what I had done or was doing to provoke them -- and how to stop doing whatever it was. It wasn't until high school that I finally understood that none of it was my fault.
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[personal profile] antisoppist 2015-01-03 03:21 pm (UTC)(link)
"I don't want to go to the party"
"You have to go to the party or they won't ask you again"
"But I don't want them to ask me again"
"Well you still have to go to the party because it is polite"

This sort of thing resulted in an attitude of "well I will do socially acceptable thing if I must but you will not make me enjoy it" and the assumption that everyone was mostly doing things they didn't enjoy to be polite and I was just worse at being selfless than they were and needed to try harder. This has not been a good mode for life.

But with my own kids in not doing that I worry I'll end up producing selfish monsters instead.


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[personal profile] skygiants 2015-01-03 04:08 pm (UTC)(link)
I do not remember any social guidance from my parents - which doesn't mean I didn't get any, but apparently none that stuck. Although my parents were also a socially awkward turtles in their youths, so I don't know what advice he would've given. But generally my habits of wandering around with a book in my hand at all times rather than interacting with others were not curbed.

I do remember guidance on not doing whatever dick thing other children were doing -- for example, when I was six or seven I picked up the word "gay" as an insult, and my parents sat me down and explained what it meant, and that it meant my aunts, and that the fact that other kids were wrong about things didn't mean I should be.
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[personal profile] crystalpyramid 2015-01-03 05:28 pm (UTC)(link)
No guidance, other than unhelpful things such as "you should invite other kids over!" from my anxious mother who wanted other people to come over but wasn't going to engineer it herself. Or concern about me airing our family issues in public because it might reflect badly on me.
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[personal profile] liseuse 2015-01-03 08:17 pm (UTC)(link)
My mother never bothered telling me to stop reading because she realised it was an entirely futile endeavour. I had a lot of conversations along the lines of:

"I don't want to go to X's birthday party"
"Well you have to go because they won't invite you again if you don't"
"That would be lovely. Because I don't want to go"
"You have to go"
[...]
"Oh look, X has invited you to their Happening party"
"I don't want to go. I went to their birthday. It was horrible"
"You have to go"

Luckily I spent a lot of time in the Pony Club as a child, so I managed to spend time with other people my age who also only wanted to talk about one thing, and who I only had to see for a relatively short amount of time. And having to take care of the horses meant that I usually managed to escape too much after-school and on weekends socialising. I was Taking Responsibility so it was okay. And R and I made friends because we swapped lifts to ballet, and he had a worse time of it because someone told the people we went to school with.

I suspect my mother didn't really know what advice to give me (I got a lot of the classic "they're just jealous of how smart you are" when I was being bullied, which, even as a six/seven year old I knew to be patently untrue) because she is also slightly terrible at making friends.
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[personal profile] liseuse 2015-01-04 09:12 pm (UTC)(link)
Child Me would have fought you to the death, and probably won because she'd have got her old, cranky, Dales pony involved.
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[personal profile] thistleingrey 2015-01-03 09:21 pm (UTC)(link)
I carried a book around everywhere, too, including the mall when my mother and I shopped for our clothing. (My father grounded me off reading. Fuck educational. Then I got a PhD.)

My mother did most of the minimal advising, but it was minimal and reactive (aside from general injunctions to be polite, etc.); both parents did try to get me to talk to strange kids at the park. The main advising I remember is the year that the bullying was bad enough to make me cry, aged 6-7. Then too, my mother had taught kids under ten and has a bunch of sibs, so she knew about variation well before having only-child me.

My daughter has begun turning over these things already and recently asked, "Why would someone say, 'You don't even know anything'?" We discuss things she brings up, and once in a while I speak approvingly of something I saw that she or another child did, but increasingly I try to button my lip about specific events. She's four, and planting seeds for observing pos/neg things other kids do happened at ages 2-3. IMO, by four, if no one's hitting or saying excruciatingly mean things, they have to work out problems themselves or they'll think that an adult should always step in and adjudicate.

(We did discuss specific things one could say/do--including nothing at all--if child A says to child B, "God, you're such a baby," because my daughter was child C watching and felt really uncomfortable.)
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[personal profile] thistleingrey 2015-01-06 05:35 am (UTC)(link)
YES. I still walk sidewalks that way sometimes, with room to look down, when unaccompanied. (I pause reading to cross streets. At least.)

heh, that is great.

Advice to me was to say hi but deflect or ignore most remarks, to say "I don't want to play with you anymore" if pushed to it, and generally to avoid the person--but it really had become bad. It helped, partly because my stiffened spine encouraged two others who didn't like the bully to talk to me more, which was only serendipitous. And the next year I changed schools for unrelated reasons, so I don't know how things would have gone.
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[personal profile] ironed_orchid 2015-01-04 06:36 am (UTC)(link)
My parents were both the sort of people who often stood on the edge of the crowd looking in, rather than participating.

They did help organize days visiting or being visited by other children from school, and it's only in hindsight I realized that it benefiting the parents by providing reciprocal childcare arrangements.

During a fight with my mum last year I discovered that she had no idea I was being bullied and harassed for three years in high school, but she did go in to fight for me when I received a C on an English assignment, and argued that they should put me in the A English class for at least a year. So it seems that grades in subjects she cared about mattered, but my ability to socialize did not register much.
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[personal profile] lovepeaceohana 2015-01-05 05:15 am (UTC)(link)
Hmm. I don't remember any specific advice, per se, but my parents are both extraverts and were more than happy to lead by example, or to offer specific advice if teen-me bothered to ask. I read a lot as a kid, and later gamed a lot, and I think this confused them - especially my dad - in terms of, like, the quality of friendships that I went on to develop? But I wasn't particularly unhappy as long as I had books, so I think they just sort of went with it.