Once on the highway a kid made a lil heart at me with his hands from a bus window and I flipped him off and he and his friends lost their minds. It was hilarious.
I flipped off the toll gate attendant once in 4th grade when we were coming back from some event. Another kid on the bus narc’ed on me and I got detention. Would do again.
PS: I still flip off the automated toll readers. Fuck the system.
Lol my aunt used to have a job looking at those photos when people claimed this or that. She showed me some funny ones. That said I always do something obscene. Unlikely a human sees it anymore but if so I hope their day got a little better.
They were all looking at their phones.
so was the person driving
and me, now
Gen x and millennials know they were absolute terrors as children. We don’t want to deal with that shit so we’re raising our kids to be better than we were.
If we were it was only because we were abused and neglected by our boomer parents.
IDK about this. Today’s extreme focus on helicopter parenting seems to view “having room to play” as CPS-worthy neglect. Shouldn’t there be a middle ground?
There are different kinds of neglect besides not being physically colocated. Ignoring your childs needs for example. Some parents may spend nearly all of their time around their children, but never do anything to address their emotional needs, or even actively suppress them. As a child I was often punished or denigrated for having and expressing strong emotions that were inconvenient for my parents, to the point I felt like they didn’t want me to have emotions at all. Some parents neglect their children’s sensory needs, sanitary needs, hunger, thirst, need for sleep, need for solitude, need for play, need for socialization, need for autonomy, need for learning, need for structure, or whatever else. I would argue helicopter parents usually neglect a number of their child’s emotional needs and treat their children more like a doll or pet than a whole person they are responsible for raising into an adult.
besides not being physically colocated
This isn’t neglect IMO. Kids should have at least some time separate from their parents (tbf, this means different things at different stages of childhood).
The rest of your post, OTOH, is spot on.
You were implying that some people these days think lack of helicopter parenting is neglect. I wasn’t saying it is, I was in fact refuting that position. It would whoever be considered neglect if someone was never around their kids. You know what they say, the dose makes the poison.
Ahh, gotcha, yeah, I misread you there. Sorry about that.
I think I spent most of my non-school times at home lol.
I was born in 2002
When I was in China, we mostly just stayed locked at home because parents are at work all the time (beside going to school)
When we move to the US, I was put in afterschool programs when I suffered what amounted to psychological torture (I mean I was basically in a foreign country and didn’t even get time to “recharge my social battery”), and I never had the eslf esteem to really make friends with English-only kids for those the first few years of my life here.
So that inertia just stayed… I just got used to not “going outaide” it just been how my life is…
I mean sometimes I did outside… but I’ve almost always been acompanies by parents
Not surprisintly never had much real friends, never made any deeper connections beyong just talking in school…
Immigrant parenra really just either have no time or is terrified of CPS…
So yea I have fear of the outside world basically…
A lot depends on where outside was too.
I grew up partly in a city/burb then we moved to the woods.
I actually played outside in the burbs because it had ode walls to ride bikes on and more kids near by. But playing out in the woods was more time outside, except in hunting city and after dark.
Yea maternal grandma is just like “this is just how it is these days, if you let your kids go outside, they’ll get kidnapped” (talking about China)
I recently discovered a YouTuber channel called THE DADBOD VETERAN, and he explains very well the neglect of GenX from their parents. Just left to our own device.
All school buses these days have black out windows, like the one in the OP. Wild shit happened before the tint, like kids getting into literal fist fights when two buses stopped side by side at a red light.
And kids in the back of the bus were always the wild rebels, “mooning” the cars behind them was not uncommon in the old days.
Right? I remember thinking “Why did Rosa Parks want to sit at the front? The back of the bus is where all the cool people are!”
Because she was not allowed to. I mean yeah haha cool kids in the back 'n everything, but throwing in Rosa Parks is a little tasteless.
I don’t know if you know this but kids start out dumb and insensitive until they are taught.
I mean put yourself in my perspective here, suburban white boy in elementary school.
I don’t think there was even one black kid in my own grade until high school.
My only knowledge of prejudice being a bad thing came from an MLK poster in first grade, and my second grade teacher reproducing Jane Elliot’s experiment in class (which in retrospect is kinda fucked up and traumatized me into being a good person, because I wasn’t allowed near my best friend).
Edit: thinking way back, my parents owned a triple-decker and we lived on the bottom floor and rented the other two. When I was maybe 5 or so the third floor tenant was a black family with a kid my age and we were best friends until they moved out the following year.
My point is, as a kid, I had literally no idea what prejudice or racism was until someone told me.
You are very sensitive. A good quality but can be hard.
I had that exact thought in school
That sucks
Passed the sportsball team bus and no hams were pressed
Why would they even bother to flip you off? That just doesn’t make sense
Because fuck em lmao
I know why: because the bus was empty. Education isn’t in favor nowadays.
How in the world did you have energy as a kid to flip off anyone? I barely had energy to walk to the bus.
That doesn’t make any sense. You have more energy as a kid than any other time in your life by a massive margin.
Were you malnourished?
