I just have to ask this because it is something I have thought about and wondered for years.
You know those kids in your class... the extremely naughty and rude ones. The ones who whine and are super needy. The ones who tell you story after story after story. The ones who bully other kids and are just mean. And the ones who you just aren’t that fond of?
When they go home to their parents every night, do their parents really like them and enjoy being with them at night, on the weekends, on vacations?
I mean my son is 22. He was a good kid, good student, teachers liked him. I loved having him home after school, the summers, weekends, etc because he was just a nice human, fun to be around and treated others like he wanted to be treated.
How can some of these people really like being with their kid all the time?! If I had to see some of these kids past 2:45 pm, EVERYDAY, I’d go nuts.
I have a girl who whines, is mean to other kids, non stop talks, and steals from classmates and her parents (they know this). The mom thinks her daughter is just the most awesome kid around. Her kindergarten brother is a pain too (we are buddies with their class). Really lady? I doubt she’s that much different at home!
I have two kids currently that I would bet my lunch money their moms don't give a rat's behind about. Calling them "brats" and "little sh!ts" and "an animal" during the course of a parent teacher conference and not in a loving, jokey way. It's not surprising these kids have behavioral issues. It breaks my heart.
I might get flamed for this, but IMO a lot of the time those issues stem from the parents themselves. Either the parents also have those qualities and therefore don't see them as negative/aren't annoyed by them, or the parents are neglectful and aren't spending much time with the kid anyway.
My most "annoying" kid this year has issues that are 100% parent created. Mom flat out encourages this type of behavior and literally seems to relish there being things "wrong" with her child. We've talked about how it's like a non-medical Munchhausen's by proxy.
It is generational and getting worse. The parents were terrible and the kids are a notch above terrible and their kids will be worse and so on. It is super sad. We studied this in sociology in college.
Many behaviors are reinforced/taught at home - a whiny child eventually gets a parent to cave, a bully sees it mirrored among the adults, disrespect is passed around like candy. I would hazard a guess that many behaviors are attention-seeking because there are so many stressors in the adult world, including time for your family. Many parents take the path of least resistance.
So, my experience has been that all parents think their children are wonderful, even when they are not. Teachers and their own kids are no different. It's just the way it is.
I think there are a couple of different scenarios. I think there are parents who really have a hard time being at all objective about their child's behavior. About 95% of the time, they think their child's bratty behavior is adorable. In that other 5% - when they're especially tired, stressed, irritable - they may drastically overreact to their child's bratty behavior and then blame themselves. These are those caring but wildly inconsistent parents who worry so much about what other people think about THEM that they never stop think that it's not good for their children to be so poorly behaved that people don't like them.
But I think that often those really needy, whiny, attention-seekers are the ones who spend all their time at home parked in front of a TV, computer or gaming system, and their parents do the same, so nobody has to interact with each other. These parents don't know or care how annoying their children are.
Despite the current trend that all crummy people had some kind of trauma, ime 99.9% of crummy adults were the sort of children OP is talking about. When the bar is so low, anything is acceptable,
In my district, I noticed these sorts were often the kind to be at school when it opened, leave not a second before lights were turned off in the building, fed some kind of fast food dinner often in the car, and then left to watch tv/computer in their room. Rinse and repeat.
When I first started teaching, there were no snow days. Parents were able to realize the conditions were unsafe. If you didn't have a babysitter or school was the only place your child got food, you were too embarrassed to say so. You didn't expect a teacher to risk their safety to babysit when you knew fully well most of the school wouldn't be in.
All good answers to your pondering. Kids like these have a miserable home life usually. And the answer I learned before I retired. The kids hardest to love NEED it them most............
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11-21-2019, 06:23 PM
