Kids vs kids

On the other side of the coin, I despise what kids do to each other. I just wish the adults could see beyond the 'innocent' kid crap and just see how vicious, rotten, nasty, and back-stabbing a lot of kids are.
I haven't forgotten some of the stunts I pulled and what a hell of a lot of other little bastards did to me. To this day I would luv to kick their teeth in.

Kids can be cruel and parents just say they are being kids.

I got picked on a lot by other kids while I was growing up. I did learn along the way, however, that some of the awful behavior from by some of these thugs was due to abusive upbringing in the home. While I am not claiming that this excuses the bad behavior, it does give me an explanation as to why some of them behaved the way they did.

Don't get me wrong, behaving badly can be overcome. One of my good friends in high school (and someone I remain in touch with today) was someone who had picked on me a lot about 5 years earlier. Tom had a tough childhood (his dad died in a car crash and his mother remains a bit looney) but has turned out fine despite some difficult obstacles. Tom has been married for 20 years and is a fellow CF.

Two friends of Tom were my greatest enemies. These two morons (Joey and Jerry) were brothers and had been raised in an abusive household. The older one (Joey), our age, actually treated me civilly at the end of our HS days and escaped his house of horrors by joining the Air Force. However, Tom told me, he committed suicide in the 1990s. As he had fallen out of touch with Tom in the 1980s (after being a pain in the ass to him), Tom was hardly saddened to hear the news. (Neither was I, of course.) Joey's younger brother (Jerry), meanwhile, has been in and out of prison since then. Neither my friend nor I expect to ever encounter him again.

Living a good life, as Tom and I (and all of you here) know, is the best revenge.

I think a lot of the visciousness is learned from the parents. The hostility at home between moo and duh. General unhappy home lives add to it.

That, coupled with parents not teaching their kids how to be decent humans.

I've been there, too. Life in jr. high and high school was hell a lot of the time. It helped me decide that I didn't want to risk having a kyd like myself who would be victimized by the more "popular" shits.d Sometimes I wonder if I'm missing anything; but I have students that I like and respect, so it's not like I have no contact with kyds. Teaching violin seems the best way for me to interact with the young ones.

You know, I never got picked on, and I didn't do any picking. However, in 3rd grade the class loser came up to me and asked to be my friend and I told him i couldn't and that he knew why.

I've never forgotten that little boy.

i have so many vicious stories from grade school/junior high, it's embarrassing to admit:

the "fat girl" - our mothers forced us to be friends with her. we made fun of her mercilessly and made her cry. she is actually one of my best and oldest friends these days and i feel so guilty for being such a little bitch to her for years. it is true that kids, like adults, feel safe in a pack mentality. they will gang up on others even though they know it is wrong.

the girl who was a year older than me when i was in sixth grade calling me a "dog" to my face with other members of my class in earshot. she seemed to really enjoy making me uncomfortable while i just sat there trying not to cry which would only give her more satisfaction.

popular girl's birthday party in junior high - we played a game where every girl took off one shoe and put it in a pile in the corner. each boy picked a shoe, and danced with the girl whose shoe it was. well, i wore a pair of plaid flannel converse sneakers (this was 1993), while all the other girls, of course, had "normal" shoes like penny loafers. after the dust settled from the shoe-grab, the ONLY shoe left in the corner was mine. of course, the boys all knew that the "weird" shoe belonged to the "weird" girl! it was so traumatic. (feel free to use this as a scene in your coming-of-age movie masterpiece, as long as you give credit!)

also note this all happened in private, catholic, suburban schools! i don't know why i was singled out - i looked pretty normal. unless it was because we didn't have a lot of money, i got way better grades than everyone else, and by sixth grade it was clear that the clothes i wore and music i liked was definitely not in the mainstream.

When I taught in a rural public school district, I saw some pretty nasty behavior from high schoolers. Those most often on the receiving end of the viciousness were those kids deemed "poor" by those in the "in-crowd." It was a common insult to call another student "poor," right to their face, often in front of others.

This behavior really pushed my buttons, as I too had been picked on for my parents not having much money as I was growing up, so I knew firsthand how humiliating it was, and I ALWAYS called the kids on it. It was my goal to make a lasting impression on them about how important it is to treat other people as you would like to be treated.

To be honest, I didn't have a lot of friends in school and in my neighborhood. Some, but not crowds of them. The good ones back then are still my friends now. I pretty much hated kids even when I was a kid myself.

I genuinely think that a lot of the vile behaviour in kids is in-born, not learned. And where it is learned, they get it from older kids not parents.

Example. Kids who torture animals. This is in-born. They want to see how the animal will react when they do this or that to it, and they're perfectly capable of inventing harmful things without anyone else's guidance. Some things aren't that harmful, just cruel. Case in point, a friend of mine in secondary school -- a perfectly normal middle-stream girl -- told me how she used to torture her mother's exotic fish when she was about 6 or 7. She invented this elaborate ritual when she was unsupervised where she would take a certain number of kleenexes and lay them on the floor, then retrieve one of the angelfish with the net. She'd put it on the floor and put two layers of kleenex over it, then press on it lightly to feel it struggling. Within a minute, it'd be back in the tank swimming around, because she knew if it died she'd be blamed. But I remember this and think it's a compulsion of children before they develop genuine empathy -- they sincerely do not care about the discomfort or pain of other beings until around 11 or years of age. When kids act sympathetic before then, it's usually pure imitation and not heartfelt.

As for kids being cruel to other kids, likewise they're perfectly capable of dreaming up awful things to do to others without ever having suffered it themselves. It makes me angry when psychologists try to assert that they learn this shit from adults. They don't necessarily. The famous toddler-abductors-torturers-and-killers Jon Venebles and Robert whats-his-name in the north of England in the early 90s (who abducted that little boy Jamie right from under his mother's nose, led him away and killed him in a disused rail yard) were neither abused or disadvantaged in any way. Yet at their age of 9 they knew enough to experiment with the little kid in very cruel ways just to see what he would do. I remember reading they put paint in his eyes, they made him put stuff in his mouth, and they even put old batteries they found up his backside. This is all juvenile purposeless and unprepared stuff, make-it-up-as-you-go-along -- which is apparently not the way adults operate if they ever do awful things to another person.

Innocent?! Haha! Anything and everything except!

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"The death of creativity is a pram in the hallway"
- Cyril Connolly

I was just thinking about this today. I caught a kindergartner messing around with one of the instruments when he thought I wasn't looking, and he managed to make one of the pieces fall off. The piece was meant to come off, but he didn't know that so he thought that he had broken it. I was just annoyed because he touched something that I had told him not to touch. He didn't know that I had seen him do it, and lied through his teeth ("it wasn't me") until he realized that I wasn't buying it. Then he started with the stories about why he had touched it ("so-and-so broke it, I was trying to fix it" etc. etc.).

This 5 year old was telling any lie he could think of to try and get out of being in trouble. "Kids are born innocent?" I doubt it.

I was the fat girl for the entire nine years I was in parochial school, and I'm sure all the boys thought I would be like any other fat girl and break into tears upon being called fat. Oh, how wrong they were - I didn't take "fat" as an insult, but an observation, which took the wind right out of their sails. But I still decided to teach the little fuckers a lesson about common courtesy - I slapped, punched, kicked and threw rocks at anyone who dared cross me. I wasn't a bully, because I was knocking kids around for a reason. Needless to say, these boys learned to either shut their face holes or run really fast...some of them I eventually got along with.

And I totally hear you about lying...ohhhh I lied about everything as a kid. Of course, my mother was off her rocker and would scream blue murder at me and threaten her mother with bodily harm if I did badly on a quiz or what-not, so I think I was a little justified in wanting to avoid trouble. But no one ever told me it wasn't okay to lie, and I made shit up all the time to get out of trouble and to not invoke my mother's wrath. Around the time I was in third or fourth grade, I learned to forge Mom's signature, which came in very handy when notes got sent home that had to be signed by her. All my exams got sent home every week and my mother had to sign them to prove she saw them, so I'd hide the bad grades and sign them myself later. I also signed quite a few permission slips. Go me.

I wasn't as bad as some bratty kids, but I was still a big ass-cramp.

"I genuinely think that a lot of the vile behaviour in kids is in-born, not learned. And where it is learned, they get it from older kids not parents. "

DINGDINGDING! And we have a winner.

Every time I hear someone blubber that kids "learn bad behavior" or "are born being good, but the world makes them bad" I want to scream. They are NOT born perfect angels, and why we as a culture insist on saying that they are open to debate is beyond my comprehension.

Each and every child ever born already knows darn well how do MISbehave. Its up to the parents (primarily) to teach them how to behave, applying the Board of Knowledge when needed. What's the first word almost all toadlers seem to know by heart? "NO!!!". Not "mama" or "dada". I've seen it happen with every one of my siblings and with other kids as well...as Mr.Gore might say "An Inconvenient Truth".

I think that Catholics, Episcopalians, and perhaps some of the other ones who sprinkle/Christen/Baptize shortly after birth are WELL aware that even baybees are NOT born without sin NOR are they born inherently "good". According to their own reasoning, any descendant of Adam basically inherits the "original sin" and is therefore BORN bad. While I have a problem wrapping my head around that theory, I am CONVINCED that after the crying phase before they can otherwise communicate their hunger or pain, that kids are every bit as rotten as adults can be and possibly more so because of the "A kid can get away with it" mentality. There is NO DOUBT that older kyds can be purposeful assholes and this can start in nursery school.

Kids hit each other (sometimes HARD), they steal one another's crayons without adult coaching just because they want them, they take other kyds' toys without permission, they can be destructive, and as many a moomie blog will attest that they can kick and literally bite the hell out of the very hands (or teat) that feeds them. They call moomie names, hit her, slap her, and otherwise are little hellions. I think that "the terrible twos" is just an excuse. I think that it's at age two when they develop cognitive thought processes and are capable of feelings of jealousy and anger that they traditionally begin acting like the biggest assholes. I think that ages 2-4 need more discipline than any other age in childhood and if that age kyd is properly raised and told NO! and spanked as often as necessary, then the rest will generally fall into place and they will likely end up with a decent kyd. As evidenced by growing kiddie crime, we have a LOT of parents who are molly coddling these toddlers rather than bud nipping it at the root. IMO.

Cambion Wrote:
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> I was the fat girl for the entire nine years I was
> in parochial school, and I'm sure all the boys
> thought I would be like any other fat girl and
> break into tears upon being called fat. Oh, how
> wrong they were - I didn't take "fat" as an
> insult, but an observation, which took the wind
> right out of their sails. But I still decided to
> teach the little fuckers a lesson about common
> courtesy - I slapped, punched, kicked and threw
> rocks at anyone who dared cross me. I wasn't a
> bully, because I was knocking kids around for a
> reason. Needless to say, these boys learned to
> either shut their face holes or run really
> fast...some of them I eventually got along with.
>
Wow, you just about described my school life, except I was "weird" and hung out with some other "weird" kids. Mostly, we were considered weird because we willingly read books. One day I got fed up with the teasing and took a swing at one of the kids who was teasing us and amazingly enough, the punch connected and I knocked him down. I realized then that No One expected a girl to fight, and used that to my advantage on an almost constant basis. I also learned, the first one to get to the teacher crying is the winner, and as a result rarely got in trouble for the fights I got in.

Kids are one of the most horrible, back stabbing group of monsters there are. There's a reason why "Lord of the Flies" is the kind of book it is.

"It truly is the one commonality that every designation of humans you can think of has, there's at least one asshole."
--Me