metaphortunate son (
metaphortunate) wrote2015-01-02 09:25 pm
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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.
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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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.
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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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I think I worked out really early that not everyone was going to like me, so there's that.
Yeah, I'm hearing that most adult attempts to help are at best useless and at worst horribly counterproductive. :(
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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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I remember reading my parents' John Holt books, but it didn't noticeably affect the way I learned.
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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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I'm hearing a lot about parents trying to help in horribly counterproductive ways. :(
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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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"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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My parents definitely made me go to social events with them that involved socializing with the children of their friends, but I don't recall them making me go to social events involving other kids that they themselves weren't interested in going to.
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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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"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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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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Probably the stupidest example of that was bringing Bridge to Terabithia on a trip to Marshall's and then having to fight so hard not to just break down in sobs in the middle of the Girls' section. Mom & brother, who had not read the book, obviously "Why is she in tears while buying socks?"
ETA: Ah! So - what did they advise about the bullying? Did it help?
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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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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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