When kids get discouraged

[babochka]

Tis_Bearself:

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

Goodness gracious, not in my city!

In what decade? I’m thinking that in most places in the US, most people who were raised up until about the early 80s would have experienced this sort of independence. It is really a tragedy that we stood to our children’s growth and independence in the way that we do now.

 

[Allegra]

The supervisor was apologetic and, as I said upthread, indicated that the guy was new and wasn’t doing too hot. I haven’t heard back from the other people I emailed, but I suspect they aren’t back from their vacations yet. The library is somewhat of a community library as well, so it keeps hours even outside of the semester, but the new classes don’t start until the 12th, so the full staff isn’t there. I actually hadn’t mentioned the incident to my daughter at all and had mostly forgotten it over the holiday, but today and yesterday she didn’t want to go up to the counter to do the transactions and that’s what got me worrying about it again.

 

[Allegra]

I’m imagining the ironic scene of a camera crew following a 5yo around the block to do their first errand…alone. LOL.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

It is really a tragedy that we stood to our children’s growth and independence in the way that we do now.

Yeah, I’m honestly not convinced that it does all that much good anyway to restrict the kids. It seems like kids are still frequently abducted and/or harmed by “trusted” adults like babysitters, family members and neighbors, and there have been plenty of stranger abductions where the kid was literally grabbed right out of his or her own yard. I will however grant that many communities nowadays are not set up to be walkable places where a kid could easily walk or even ride his bicycle to a store. And, this is my own personal bias, but I’m really leery of any community that doesn’t have fairly dense housing and instead has houses spaced far apart, or wooded areas/ fields etc. I was always taught that if I encountered a threatening situation, run to the nearest house, bang on the door etc which is fine when there’s five houses in a row on the blocks but not so fine when you’re living out in the woods somewhere.

 

[babochka]

I’m imagining the ironic scene of a camera crew following a 5yo around the block to do their first errand…alone. LOL.

Reality TV is never reality, but the point is that this is normal in Japan.

 

[Allegra]

I would say, even later than that. It’s been a while since I worked retain or fast food, but I was at the Taco Bell in the early 2000s and definitely had young children come to the counter alone or be sent in from the parking lot to get more napkins and sauce. And I had groups of kids around 3rd grade or so walk down and buy lunch together.

 

[PetraG]

OK, but we’re on the side that believes: “But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment, and whoever says to his brother, ‘Raqa,’ will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to fiery Gehenna” (Matt. 5:22) and “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun set on your anger, and do not leave room for the devil… And do not grieve the holy Spirit of God, with which you were sealed for the day of redemption. All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice; be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.” (Eph 4:26,30-32)
And so on and so on… if you are only kind to those who are kind to you, well, the pagans do as much, be perfect as the Father is perfect who rains on the just and the unjust, and so on and so on…Allegra, I know you, you’re on the same page with me on all of that.

Having a reading space is not the same as being a full-fledged patron who can return books. Under no circumstances should children be left who will wander out of the space set aside for children “while their parents are looking for a book.” It was kind if the staff accepted books from her before with no issue, but that really ought to be seen as an unusual kindness by the staff, not as something that parents are entitled to expect from a college library.

You’re right that “idiot” is not right. We’re not teaching our children to call people names when they are bad at their jobs. It is kind of like how we had to learn to say “THAT MAN WAS NOT SAFE!!” when we get cut off in traffic instead of using that other kind of language we don’t want our children to learn. “Idiot” is of course a way of referring to other people that we don’t want our children to learn. Our Lord said that quite plainly.

You’re already saying that; I’m saying that it doesn’t harm a six-year old to refer to someone who lacks manners as someone who lacks understanding about how to act. Unless you think that the person really is actively looking for ways to be bad at his job and to traumatize small children, it is OK to call it a misunderstanding. You can gamble on saying he didn’t understand that very young people are tender-hearted and need to be treated with particularly kind manners. We’ve committed harm to others out of carelessness or thoughtlessness ourselves, after all. The measure we’d like to have measured out to us is the one we ought to teach our little children to measure with. So, yeah, maybe calling it a misunderstanding is an unbelievable mercy… so tell your child that some day you are hoping for some unbelievable mercy, too, especially for the stuff you didn’t even get was “that wrong.”

 

[Allegra]

It’s just funny because we want to video tape EVERYTHING our kids do and it’s kind of hard to build independence that way!

 

[babochka]

babochka:

It is really a tragedy that we stood to our children’s growth and independence in the way that we do now.

Yeah, I’m honestly not convinced that it does all that much good anyway to restrict the kids. It seems like kids are still frequently abducted and/or harmed by “trusted” adults like babysitters, family members and neighbors, and there have been plenty of stranger abductions where the kid was literally grabbed right out of his or her own yard. I will however grant that many communities nowadays are not set up to be walkable places where a kid could easily walk or even ride his bicycle to a store. And, this is my own personal bias, but I’m really leery of any community that doesn’t have fairly dense housing and instead has houses spaced far apart, or wooded areas/ fields etc. I was always taught that if I encountered a threatening situation, run to the nearest house, bang on the door etc which is fine when there’s five houses in a row on the blocks but not so fine when you’re living out in the woods somewhere.

The traffic is definitely more of a concern for me than the threat of stranger kidnapping, which is extremely rare. Still, there are creeps and I don’t usually send my super young kids around the neighborhood alone. They take a sibling with them. One of the differences between now and when we grew up is that people don’t tend to know their neighbors as well. Also, if one of my kids is going somewhere alone, I have a preference for taking a bike instead of walking. It makes harassment less likely and escape easier. And even though kidnapping is rare, creeps that make kids feel uncomfortable are pretty common.

 

[Allegra]

I don’t see a dichotomy between forgiving someone and still stating that what they did was wrong and mean. Pretending that they didn’t understand what they were doing isn’t really forgiving them. It’s making excuses. It’s alright to say, “What they/you did was wrong, completely wrong, and I still forgive them/you.” In a way, that’s a bigger form of forgiveness, especially when the person doesn’t believe they did anything wrong.

 

[Cruciferi]

That just seems really late to me!

Well @Allegra times have changed. This isn’t the 1950’s anymore and I don’t live in Mayberry. In my family, you didn’t make transactions until you had money to spend. We weren’t given allowances either, we worked for our money.

 

[Allegra]

Yeah, I’m still not comfortable with her walking through the neighborhood alone. We don’t like close enough to any place she’d want to go anyway, except the book nook at the corner. I’ve let her go there with her cousin and her cousin’s phone, but I wouldn’t let her go alone because there’s no sidewalk.

 

[Allegra]

Dude, my MOTHER was born in 59, not me! And we didn’t get an allowance exactly, although they would sometimes give us money for certain special chores like painting the woodwork or vacuuming out the car. I got babysitting money when I was older. My uncle often gave us money for ice creams or sodas or things like that.

 

[babochka]

Allegra:

That just seems really late to me!

Well @Allegra times have changed. This isn’t the 1950’s anymore and I don’t live in Mayberry. In my family, you didn’t make transactions until you had money to spend. We weren’t given allowances either, we worked for our money.

Teaching my kids to go to the store and make purchases on behalf of the family is an important contribution to the family. When I was a kid making these errands, they were largely to benefit the family and an added bonus was that I had some independence myself. As an aside, opportunities for kids to bring in their own income are few and far between these days. I had a paper route and raked leaves for elderly neighbors. Kids aren’t allowed to have paper routes these days and elderly neighbors often have a yard service with a noisy blower.

On a larger scale, I now have a teenage driver and his contribution toward his insurance involves stopping at the store for me and taking his siblings places.

 

[Allegra]

I remember when I was 8 or so, thinking I was rich. I helped my aunt move my grandma from her apartment and she gave us each $20! I could buy all the Popsicles!

 

[Allegra]

So, I just received an email from the head of student services, which is the department that overlooks the library. Essentially, he/she (Robin) apologized for the employee’s behavior and said that the matter had already been resolved within the library before she’d even gotten my email. Then she gave me a description of the ways the university tries to support parents, including the aforementioned reading space in the library, children’s computers in the computer labs, childcare for students and employees, lactation rooms, policies protecting pregnant and parenting students, and frequent staff development on the subject of supporting parenting students. So I’m kind of glad I didn’t call the news. It’s true too because when I delivered my baby six weeks early, the instructor of the class I was taking was not only supportive, but gave me extensions and help so I could finish the class from the NICU. So this isn’t a “we hate people’s children” sort of place.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

This isn’t the 1950’s anymore and I don’t live in Mayberry.

As babochka said, kids were routinely going around by themselves, or in small groups of young kids (like sibling and younger kid), right up through the 1980s. I think the 1990s is when things started to change.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

That’s good to know, because even if it is a college library rather than a community library, I’m sure there are plenty of students and professors who have young children and may occasionally need to bring them to the library. Plus, those young kids are potential future students at that institution, and their parents are current employees and customers of the place. It’s good business sense to support parents.

 

[PetraG]

I don’t see a dichotomy between forgiving someone and still stating that what they did was wrong and mean. Pretending that they didn’t understand what they were doing isn’t really forgiving them. It’s making excuses. It’s alright to say, “What they/you did was wrong, completely wrong, and I still forgive them/you.” In a way, that’s a bigger form of forgiveness, especially when the person doesn’t believe they did anything wrong.

He certainly did not understand his job or get that children can learn to carry out business with adults. That’s what I meant by “misunderstanding.” He seemed to have no clue that your daughter could possibly have business to conduct with him, rather than seeing that she could and just deciding to be mean to her because he was on some kind of a power trip or wanted to inconvenience you.

It is fair to ask if this guy remembers what it was like to be six years old, but sadly, when too many people were children their parents treated them as if they were incompetent invalids with nothing to say that could possibly of interest to an adult. They go through their young lives under the presumption that they won’t be welcome in polite company. Well, if their parents never teach them how to behave, they probably weren’t. They grow up thinking children can be treated as some kind of unmanageable pets because that is the way their parents treated them. If someone gets an upbringing like that–and I wish I could say it was rare–it isn’t a stretch to think that they don’t know that a six year old as competent as your daughter even exists.

In other words, it is sad but unfortunately possible that this person misunderstood what children as young as your daughter are capable of doing. I suppose it could be patronizing to suppose that, but my experience says that if your parents presumed that all small children are incompetent, you will grow up to assume that, too. Those people are out there. Being clueless and being purposefully mean aren’t the same thing.

 

[Allegra]

Even if they don’t really want kids in the library, the correct thing to do is accept the books and tell the parent that kids aren’t allowed. Or put a note on the door. You don’t act like a child yourself and give a kid the silent treatment! But it turns out that isn’t even a thing.