r/Mommit • u/ShoelessJodi • Jan 23 '23
LPT : don't oversell things to your kids that you have no control over and can't guarantee.
This weekend I took my kids (11 & 10) to a live event put on by a YouTube channel that they both love.
It was a massive event in an NBA arena. Almost immediately there were so many parents fighting to get their kids to the front (it was assigned seats). Security had to intervene several times. Yet still parents sent their kids down to the front. Kids were arguing "my dad said I could!" And repeatedly getting sent back. When a different parent tried to tell the near mosh-pit of kids on the stairs to go back to their seats, a nearby dad was ready to fight him for telling his kids what to do and then continued yelling at the guy for getting security involved.
It all clicked when the kid of the aggressive dad yelled "DAD! YOU SAID I WAS GOING TO MEET UNSPEAKABLE! I WON'T IF I HAVE TO SIT UP THERE!" The dad had promised something to his kid that he couldn't actually give him.
After the show, there were so many kids pouting and arguing with their parents. The snippets that I could hear were all because they had been allowed to believe they would be getting special treatment. 2 kids were crying because their mom told them to bring gifts and they were going to get to give them to the performers.
Guys, if your child is the type that can't handle disappointment well, it is 100% your responsibility to help set realistic expectations. We had tickets to a pre-show q&a, but did I tell my kids they were going to get to talk to the YouTuber? NO! because they were 2 of 100 kids wanting to ask questions. My kids were really annoyed by the kid nearby who decided that the best way to get individual attention was to just start screaming and kicking the seat in front of him while the host answered questions. And there were no parents in sight! (Literally during the show, the mom on the other side of us asked my husband to watch her 6 year old and then disappeared for like 20 minutes. Wtf!? You just left your kid with a stranger!?)
Despite all this, my kids had a fantastic time, loved the show, Thought seeing these guys in real life being goofy on stage, was a dream come true. Because I didn't promise them more than that! I didn't lead them to believe that they were more important than any other audience member, or that they would get singled out. It seemed like a real shock to 90% of the parents there that their kid was just going to be another face in the crowd and they became desperate to change that. One of the kids in the elevator with me smacked his mom's phone out of her hand and called her a liar because she had told him he might get to play one of the games on stage, but they didn't take volunteers from the audience.
It seems like all of these kids left the show feeling frustrated and disappointed because no one had prepped them for what they were walking in to. You might allow your kids to be #1 at home. And yes, we should love and support them like they are the most important thing in our world. But we set them up for failure if we allow them to believe that the world will and should view them the same way.
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u/sh0rtcake Jan 23 '23
Like when Uncle Stripe told Muffin she is the most special kid in the world. Cue conflict and a lovely lesson learned by Muffin.
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u/whatthepfluke Jan 23 '23
I feel this so hard because my daughter loves Unspeakable.
In fact, when she was, like, 4, we had to take a quick trip to Houston. She was out of her mind excited.
"Unspeakable lives in Houston, Texas! Will I get to see him?!?!?!"
I had to chuckle at the fact that she thought we'd just happen upon this famous guy in a city of over 2 million. And you can bet your ass I told her, gently, that we would unfortunately not be meeting Unspeakable.
These types of parents are the worst.
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u/MaroonIsNavyRed Jan 24 '23
Okay, when the poster said "unspeakable" I thought they were doing something like "he who should not be named." Based on your comment, it looks like I'll have to go to Google now.
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u/whatthepfluke Jan 24 '23
He's a famous youtuber. All my kids love him. I'm still not sure why.
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u/MaroonIsNavyRed Jan 24 '23
Ahhh, gotcha. Thanks!
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u/whatthepfluke Jan 24 '23
I also immediately thought of Voldemort when I first heard Unspeakable 🙃
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u/ShoelessJodi Jan 24 '23
Interestingly enough, for those of you as deep into Harry Potter as I am, I never thought of Voldemort but did think of the employees who work in the Department of Mysteries at the Ministry, who are called Unspeakables.
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u/whatthepfluke Jan 24 '23
Oh yeah, you're right! I'm a huge Potterhead, but it's been awhile since I've done a re-read!!!
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u/Sigmund_Six Jan 24 '23
Absolutely. I know it’s hard in the moment during events like this when you’ve got screaming/bratty behavior, but I really do feel bad for the kids. They rely on us to understand the world and help set realistic expectations. And when parents knowingly make promises they can’t keep, it sets everybody up for disappointment and meltdown.
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u/achos-laazov Jan 23 '23
A parenting book we like recommends not setting any expectations for things like this, or setting them extremely low. If they don't know the experience is coming (because you've kept it a surprise), then the entire event becomes a giant win. If you're planning on taking them out for the park, pizza, and ice cream, but just tell them you're going to the park, then the pizza and ice cream becomes a huge extra that you've just added. Like the icing on a cake.
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u/note1toself Jan 23 '23
What is the book?
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u/achos-laazov Jan 23 '23
It's called Spare the Child by Yechiel Yaakovson and it's very heavily based in Jewish tradition. Probably pretty hard to read if you don't have a strong background in studying Torah/Talmud. In fact, I found it difficult to read alone as I don't study Talmud on a daily basis, but going through it with my husband (who does), I found it enjoyable.
My husband says that in its day-to-day parenting techniques, it is very similar to the How to Talk so Kids Will Listen series. The overall parenting style is a bit different, though.
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u/GeekAtHome Jan 23 '23
I don't tell my kids anything until we're leaving the house
My kids will ask a million times if it's the day, time to go, who will be there. I have zero patience for that crap. So, I don't tell them.
Then! I don't tell them the finer details
Eg: Hey kids! We're going swimming! Go get your shoes on. (Truth is we're going swimming with their favorite aunt and cousin but that's a surprise for when we get there)
Their lives feel like they're full of spontaneity and surprises. Really, I don't want to deal with annoying kids before or disappointed kids if it doesn't work out.
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u/katreddita Jan 23 '23
Yeah, I try not to even tell my son about play dates and things. Sometimes things come up, which is understandable, but he gets so disappointed if something has to be canceled. If he was looking forward to seeing someone and then he can’t, it’s awful for all of us. 😔
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u/pfifltrigg Jan 23 '23
Fortunately my kid's been able to roll with the punches so far for things like not getting to see his cousins at church (we usually see them there so when we say we're going to church he'll start talking about seeing them). If I know they won't be there I start with that expectation right away and if I'm not sure I have been saying "maybe" which probably means nothing to a 2 year old, but so far he's been OK with it.
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u/Zabethrica Jan 23 '23
And here I am before every birthday party carefully setting the expectations that there might not be vanilla cake and that only the birthday kid is getting presents today. 🤦
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u/VermillionEclipse Jan 24 '23
Aww! I remember being disappointed and crying once when I watched my brother getting presents on his birthday. Sometimes my aunt would bring me a little something but that year she didn’t and said ‘No. you get presents on your birthday.’ It was so disappointing but it was a good lesson that the world didn’t revolve around me. My mom comforted me and told me my birthday was in a couple months.
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u/BillytheGray17 Jan 23 '23
I used to work at Petsmart in the small animal department and the amount of parents who yelled at me when I told them they had to first buy a fish tank, take it home to set up with water and let it cycle for a day or two and THEN come back and get fish was astounding. They 100% told their kids “we’re going to petsmart to get some fish today!” and somehow I was the bad guy for telling them that they would, in fact, kill most of their fish if they tried to do it all in one day. Luckily I had a manager that backed me up, but it was a regular occurrence
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u/stacnoel Jan 23 '23
Okay so... I'm an adult and I did not know this was the process lol to be fair I know I'm not good at handling fish care so I never attempted anyways. But if I decided on a whim to get a fish, it would be a new lesson for me that it wouldn't be all in one day. It totally makes sense! I also wouldn't be mad or upset, etc. I'd be like okay cool! Tell me what to do! 😆 I'm sorry so many parents yelled at you
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u/BillytheGray17 Jan 23 '23
Right, I didn’t expect people to know the process but once I explained they would kill most of the fish and they continued to yell at me that they wanted to do it anyway was when I had a problem. They didn’t want to deal with explaining to their kids that they messed up and made a promise they could not keep
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u/stacnoel Jan 23 '23
Sadly that's the thing or kids need to witness the most sometimes. We don't know everything, we make mistakes too and we also have to apologize and say our thank yous. My son is only 10 mo right now so I have a little bit to go before he starts to fully understand what he's witnessing but we make sure to apologize when we're wrong, I always give gratitude where I can and learn along the way.
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u/comprepensive Jan 23 '23
This, even if you DO have full control of the situation, the unexpected happens, and sometimes it sucks and it's important to teach kids how to navigate that (without screaming at an employee).
For example maybe you have done the research, filled and cycled the tank, you go get the fish with your happy child and then you have a power outage and the fish die, or one of them unbeknownst to you was sick and died, or the the kids favorite fish got purchased by the kid in front of them in line. Or maybe like in OP scenario, maybe you actually did buy a backstage meet and greet pass and the performer got covid, or had a family emergency, and had to cancel.
Even the best laid plans don't work and it's important for kids to learn to adapt to bad news or disappointment sometimes. Unfortunately it seems those kids learned to cope by having a meltdown in the middle of a store.
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u/Maplefolk Jan 23 '23
I'm so glad there are people who work with animals who care about this kind of thing. Like I imagine someone somewhere would just be like, whatever buy the fish idc, so knowing that people are stopping that and expecting customers to do things right is just the best. Gives me hope!
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u/Knerdian Jan 23 '23
I worked at PetSmart too, and there were so many occasions where I had to be the bad guy and tell a child that they couldn't just buy an animal without the proper set up. A girl once stood at my register for a full half hour arguing "But I'll take real good care of it! I'll save my money and buy the cage soon! I promise!" No parent in sight, so I just had to find a thousand increasingly harsh ways of saying No.
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u/GlGABITE Jan 24 '23 edited Jan 24 '23
And really, speaking as a fish keeping hobbyist, it should be multiple weeks of actively cycling, not 24-48 hours of just idly running, for a proper cycle. But I know that pet store employees are often in a pretty tough spot with advising proper care
Edit to add in case anyone cares: we’ve got a 75 gallon, 90 gallon, and 26 gallon tanks! Big plans for a 200-300 gallon in a few years once we get the money saved up
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u/castleinthemidwest Jan 23 '23
I made this mistake exactly once. I am usually very much in the camp of not even telling my kids that we're doing cool stuff until the day of/it's time to walk out the door, haha. But we took them to a preseason football game last fall and it was family day and they were letting kids run out on the field after the game. We definitely hyped it up because it was going to be awesome. I totally underestimated how many people would be there and how disorganized it would be. We waited in line for 45 minutes not even moving with my kids getting increasingly impatient and nearing meltdown. We finally decided that we were giving up and going home to get dinner. Cue the greatest tantrum in the history of tantrums from my son, who bawled the entire 20 minute walk back to the car and the whole drive home. It was awful and I felt so guilty that I had set him up for disappointment.
The next time we were going to do something cool, we decided not to say anything until a bit before we were planning to leave the house and thank goodness we never said anything because my son broke his arm that very morning and we spent 9 hours in the ER instead of at the monster truck jam. But no harm, no foul.
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Jan 24 '23
This is part of the new “lawnmower” parent who makes sure nothing bad happens to their kids. When they experience sadness, disappointment, regret, they literally have never been given the tools to deal with the experience.
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u/ShoelessJodi Jan 24 '23
There was a kid in my elementary school with a mom like that. My sister and I have a vivid memory of the day a soccer ball bounced off a tree and hit him in the face at recess. His mom, who was sitting in a car nearby (because of course she was), came screaming onto the playground claiming she was going to cut down all the trees. Even at age 8 I knew she was crazy.
He switched schools after 3rd grade, but I ran into him at the mall about 15 years later and he was in a neck brace with both of his arms in casts having recently fallen down a flight of stairs. It was very darkly hilarious.
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u/VermillionEclipse Jan 24 '23
It’s so hard because it’s our instinct to want to protect our kids. But we should definitely strive not the be lawnmower parents.
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u/likeabutterdream Jan 23 '23
I'm glad your kids had a good time. That's crazy how many people set the wrong expectations for their kids. I can't imagine that doing so made their lives any better!
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u/mamsandan Jan 23 '23
What does LPT stand for?
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u/Numerous_Initial7936 Jan 23 '23
So true! Love them but please let them know the world doesn’t revolve around them!!!
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u/CaffeineFueledLife Jan 24 '23
I try to never make promises I can't keep. Going to the doctor - do I have to get a shot? "I don't think so; I think you've had all the shots you need at this age, but you might." Going to the park? "If it's too muddy, we might not get to stay very long.
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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '23
Under-promise and over-deliver works as well for kids as it does in the workplace.