When kids get discouraged

[Allegra]

6yo has been working on her responsibility and social skills by completing small transactions, sometimes with me along side and sometimes with me watching from the car. Things like going into the gas station for a jug of milk, paying for the take and bake pizza at Papa Murphy’s, and taking in books to the library. She’s proud of herself when she does this and it teaches her to wait patiently, say excuse me, please, thank you, etc. This also helps me out because I don’t have to bring her little siblings out of the car in all of their mittened, snowbooted hassle. Anyway, we had to drop off books at the college library a few days back and we had a really awful experience with a snot behind the desk. Basically, I sent her in with the books and watched her go up and stand at the desk, but she came out a minute later looking confused. I asked her what was wrong and she said the person behind the desk “wasn’t talking”. I asked her a few questions like “were they on the phone” and “were they talking to someone else first” and she said “No. They were looking at me but they wouldn’t talk.” I told her to just go set the books on the counter, but she said she didn’t want to go back in alone. So, I got out the stroller and the babies and went inside and went up to the counter and asked what the problem was. The person behind the desk told me he didn’t talk to “people’s children”. So I had my daughter take her brother over to the Harry Potter themed sitting area as I not-so-charitably informed him that children, in fact, are people themselves and giving a child the silent treatment was rude and childish. Then I chewed out the supervisor for letting such an idiot work there and for the inconvenience of having to wake up one of my babies and haul them all into the library because his employee “doesn’t talk to people’s children”. (When I got home, I also emailed some other people about the experience and considered calling the news but decided that was probably a bit too much.)

Anyway, since then, my daughter has lost her confidence for doing this sort of thing. She no longer wants to go up to the counter alone or talk to the adults. I’ve explained to her that the “mean guy” was the one with the problem and nearly every other person she will ever encounter will be nice. She still seems to feel that she’s doing something wrong. I’m wondering how much I should push. Should I just wait until she’s ready or should I tell she has to? Or should I do a more subtle bribery, like give her a $5 and tell her she can get whatever she wants if she will go into Dairy Queen and hope a positive experience will get her back on track? Maybe try to get her to go in with her older cousin?

Do you think I should call the news? I wish I’d had one of those phones that take videos!

 

[Irishmom2]

Allegra, I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but I think she is too young to do things like that totally on her own. I know you we’re watching from the distance, but I think she needs to know you are right there in order to proceed forward.

As a child, older than 6 I believe, I was sent up to the corner market to get something we were out of and may have needed for dinner. A couple of times, I had the experience of not being able to find an item. My parents told me to ask someone that worked there. As a child, I was shy and the thought of speaking to someone I didn’t know was terrifying. Another time, I got up to the register and was short about 20 or 30 cents. Another customer, a stranger to me, offered the difference to the cashier and said not to worry about it. It was an awful experience.

Both experiences left an impression on me for a very long time. Had one of my parents been standing nearby I may have been able to look to them for guidance as I asked for help in both situations.

I understand wanting your children to have confidence. I made sure to foster than in my own children by having them do the things you mentioned. But I was always just a few feet back if they needed me.

Please, don’t call the news. It did not rise to that level of bad behavior.

 

[Cruciferi]

I know you we’re watching from the distance, but I think she needs to know you are right there in order to proceed forward.

Yes, my parents would always walk up with me as support. I wasn’t doing transactions totally alone until around the age of 10.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

First, congrats on being Momma Bear. I’m reminded of my own mother chewing out some switchboard operator when my mother, who was trying to train me in telephone etiquette, asked me to call my dad at work and I went through all the dialing and got to the switchboard but when I asked for Dad the lady heard my 5-year-old voice and hung up on me, thinking I was “playing with the telephone”. It’s good for a kid to know Mom’s in their corner.

Second, I think I would try the bribery angle and if that doesn’t work then you go in with her, stand 10 feet back and let her go solo while you watch. Also if you have some stories to tell from your own childhood about how you got over being shy or scared, those can help. Having her go in with her cousin is also good but eventually she will need to regain her confidence to do these things on her own, and also learn to get right back on the horse when she falls off, figuratively speaking.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

Yes, my parents would always walk up with me as support. I wasn’t doing transactions totally alone until around the age of 10.

That’s interesting. I was from the generation when parents would give their child money and send them to the corner store. Plus I was walking back and forth to school pretty much by myself (sometimes with other kids ages 6-10 but often alone) from age 6 onwards and we would go in the candy store and buy stuff. It was totally normal for me and everybody else to be doing transactions alone. In fact if you didn’t do them, the other kids would give you a fish eye like you were a baby, etc.

 

[Cruciferi]

It was totally normal for me and everybody else to be doing transactions alone.

Goodness gracious, not in my city!

 

[1Lord1Faith]

Should I just wait until she’s ready or should I tell she has to?

I definitely wouldn’t tell her she has to do any of that stuff because she would probably know that she really doesn’t have to do them.

I think you, or cousin, may have to go with her until she gets her confidence back. I don’t think it will take long for her to get back.

The hardest part is going to be trying to undo the confusion that this dork behind the counter caused your daughter. Although, trying to explain it to her might not be necessary, or even possible at her age. It might be better to walk back the “mean guy” label and just say that sometimes adults make mistakes. That approach might make her more relaxed. You don’t want her thinking, at that age, that she’s going to run into mean adults while doing these things. Maybe a mistaken adult, but not a mean one. That’s just my perspective.

 

[PetraG]

Tell her you understand why she feels that way. Tell her this is a good lesson about how much one thoughtless act can affect someone else. Tell her that even though the whole situation made you very angry, you don’t think the person behind the desk meant to be mean to her. Pray for that person and ask to have patience over the matter as penance for all the times you have said or done something thoughtless that affected someone else. Then tell her that in time she’ll be able to do what she did again, but it is OK to take some time off and heal for a bit. I think she’ll want to do it again at some point.

Do consider that the person behind the desk is not likely an idiot. It is probably just someone who has no experience with children except children who are being insufficiently supervised (which in a library, is a lot). Consider going back to the library and reconciling with the staff. That would be an unusual parent interaction, and could possibly make the incident into a more positive teaching moment for the person who had the poor interaction with your child.

At many public libraries, any child old enough to write his or her own name is old enough to be given a library card and treated with the same respect and cordiality as any other patron. That is rarely true at college libraries, however. College libraries are usually geared only towards the college students, faculty and staff. You might use that as a starting point for the conversation and the premise that this was all a very unfortunate set of misunderstandings that you would hope everyone involved regrets.

PS Do not take your child with you when you find the staff members you need to talk to. This conversation is likely to go worse before it goes better. There will be a lot of defensiveness to cut through. That could be too difficult for a 6 year old to slog through.

 

[Dan_Defender]

That’s interesting. I was from the generation when parents would give their child money and send them to the corner store.

Same here. Yes there’s the odd bad experience, but it is good for young children to learn that there’s good and bad people out there. Overprotecting them will not do them good.

 

[Emeraldlady]

I would agree with Irishmom on this one. I feel that 6 is too young to be thrown in the deep end without close backup. But I know things change from generation to generation so you probably will be the best judge of what your child needs.

I was the oldest in my family as well and was the test child as often happens. One thing that parents of my parents generation didn’t really consider was how anxiety impacted on a child from having an experience they experienced as really bad and I did suffer a lot of anxiety as a kid. One thing I learnt from that to do with my own kids was to make light of it even make a joke of it. I know that what the desk clerk did was really strange, but it wasn’t really the worst thing that will ever happen to your child. Don’t respond as if it is more than it is by calling the news and ranting too much. Try and laugh it off to convey to your daughter that it’s just a glitch type of event.

 

[Allegra]

Don’t worry. I’m not really going to call the news. She’s been doing these sort of tasks for some a few months now and she was really happy about it. When I was her age, I really loved being allowed to go to the concession stand at the ballpark or the Walgreens and buy a soda or a news paper. I used to go by myself while my parents stayed home and I felt so proud and grown up. I just want her have the same confidence, though I’m not ready to actually send her down the block by herself.

 

[Allegra]

10? Wow! I used to go to restaurants with groups of friends and order food without any grownups by the summer after second grade. I spent two weeks at a residential camp where I had to buy supplied at a trading post. That just seems really late to me!

 

[Allegra]

When I was six, my grandma would give me money and send me down the block to pick up Chinese food. They knew I was coming, but I felt so grown up! And in the summer, when our parents left us alone in the house all day, we would go to the concession stand at the pool and buy snowcones. You had to be 12 to swim without an adult, but they would let you in to buy drinks and snacks. And of course, there was the ice cream man and the library and the penny candy aisle at the drugstore. And the BIG BUCKS transaction when they send you for an entire book of stamps at the post office! And we would fight over who got to take the money in to prepay for the gas. You usually got a Dum-dum. Kids just did that kind of stuff back then.

 

[Allegra]

I don’t think she’s going to buy that a man who looked right at her and refused to acknowledge her presence was “mistaken”. That would be a severe misuse of the word, in my opinion, and I think it’s important to call a “spade” a “spade”. Some people are mistaken, but some people are mean. It’s important to know how to deal with a mean person when you come across one and realize that it isn’t you, it’s them. People are going to gaslight you and try to tell you it was a “mistake” or a “misunderstanding” or even try to say “well if you had done thus and so”, but the fact is, some people are mean. He was mean. He was trying to be mean. Lord knows why he felt entitled to be mean to a child. He apparently DID feel he was entitled, so in that sense he was mistaken. But the fact is, he was being mean. No point in trying to gaslight a kid into thinking otherwise.

 

[Catholic361]

Again congrats on being there for your daughter. I just worked for jcpenney over the holiday season, had to interact with a child who was sitting on one of the display tables and I asked to not sit on the display for their safety when they looked at me confused I reworded what I said and told them that I didn’t want them to get hurt by the display if something happened all of this with the parnt(s) nearby they didn’t say anything to me and the child responded politely to me probably because I was in uniform for the store I worked for.

 

[Allegra]

I probably won’t be going in person to talk to anyone. I sent emails and they may call me back but I don’t think I’ll go in person, since its pretty far away. This library actually has a small children’s reading space in it, so I would think a person seeking employment there would expect to see children, probably left there while their parents went looking for a book. She’s taken books in for me before with no issue. I actually think the guy might have been somewhat of something. (Not sure if “idiot” is right.) The supervisor said he was hired on Friday, they were off on Tuesday and Wednesday and it’s already been the longest week of his life. So, I get the impression that this is not the first or even the most ignorant stunt he’s pulled in his short tenure there. Like I said to the other poster, I don’t think its right to call things a “misunderstanding” that clearly aren’t. I don’t think my kid would believe me anyway and I’d probably lose some credibility there if I tried. When someone does something wrong, it’s okay to say that was wrong and they shouldn’t have done that. I do think it would help to think of him in our prayers though. We talked about asking God to help her forgive him and give her courage to try again, but I haven’t mentioned praying for “the mean guy”.

 

[Allegra]

All of that sounds appropriate to me.

 

[Allegra]

Thanks for the advice everyone. I will definitely try adding this guy to our prayers and give her more time.

 

[bluerose]

You didn’t say what the supervisor’s response was to your complaint, nor whether or not you received a response to your emails. What was their explanation for the clerk’s behavior?

Regarding the way the clerk responded, saying he doesn’t talk to “people’s children”, I can only think this: In this day and age, many people and places of business are wary of unsupervised contact with minor children. They fear that friendliness, harmless conversations, joking or even smiling, can be interpreted as a threat. I can’t count how many times I run across Facebook posts warning about potential human trafficking ploys. It’s possible that this person was merely on his guard, lest something he said be misconstrued and he finds himself facing accusations of attempting to molest or abduct the child. In my 20+ years of working retail, I have seen parents rush over to yank their child away from an innocent person who merely politely responded to a little one’s chatty questions and admonished the child not to talk to strangers (“You don’t know if they might try to kidnap you!”), leaving the adult humiliated and the uncomfortable recipient of unnecessary scrutiny by other people.

A college library is not a place where a small child is likely to be found by herself, unlike a public library or a store. Therefore, the clerk probably has never had an opportunity to learn how to interact with a child. I think referring to the clerk as an “idiot” is a little over-the-top and quite uncharitable. I think at one time or another, we all had at least one “mean” adult in our lives (the lady who got angry if our ball went into her flower garden, the man who yelled at us if we stepped off the walkway and onto his grass when trick-or-treating, etc.) that we dealt with on a regular basis with little or no intervention from our parents (“You don’t want her to get mad at you, keep the ball in our own yard!”)

Teach her to rise above other people’s actions and behavior. This happened, address it, move on. Let her see that there are far more kinder people in the world than there are mean ones. The fact that, days later, you’re still fuming about the incident might be the reason why she hasn’t been able to shake off her discouragement. Maybe she feels that if you’re still upset about it, then maybe she should be, too.

 

[babochka]

Cruciferi:

Yes, my parents would always walk up with me as support. I wasn’t doing transactions totally alone until around the age of 10.

That’s interesting. I was from the generation when parents would give their child money and send them to the corner store. Plus I was walking back and forth to school pretty much by myself (sometimes with other kids ages 6-10 but often alone) from age 6 onwards and we would go in the candy store and buy stuff. It was totally normal for me and everybody else to be doing transactions alone. In fact if you didn’t do them, the other kids would give you a fish eye like you were a baby, etc.

I’m with you. I was an extremely shy child, but it was a great thrill from me to walk to the store and buy milk or something else that my mom needed. I generally wouldn’t speak to people and I occasionally returned home without the needed item because I couldn’t find it and didn’t want to ask for it, but it didn’t stop my mom from sending me the next time.

Because of the change in our cultural climate, I have waited a little longer to send my own kids to the store. It wouldn’t do to have CPS called on me!

I think these are important skills for our children to have and it is important that they feel actually useful a and helpful. In Japan they have a TV show about children going on their first errands, usually around 5 years old. Children are certainly capable, if only we would let them!