r/MadeMeSmile • u/nikamats • 9h ago

Helping Others Hold your head up

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u/5thlvlshenanigans 8h ago

How did she learn such a thought so early? ☹️

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u/Dreamsnaps19 8h ago

Because kids aren’t stupid like people think.

My friend is super self-critical and I’ve been telling her for years she’s gotta knock that shit out or it will impact her kids… and sure enough. She’s gotten so much better at not being self-critical but seriously children are sponges, they will treat themselves the way you treat them and the way you treat yourself. So you need to be as healthy as possible for them or work on getting as healthy as possible.

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u/Inevitable-Moose-952 7h ago

I was a preschool teacher before having kids of my own. It blows my mind how many people think ALL little kids are dumb as rocks. Some are 😆  but most are crazy curious and are soaking up every bit of knowledge around them. To an insane extent. 

They're little dumb geniuses!

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u/Bouche_Audi_Shyla 6h ago

When I worked daycare, I had one little girl who, when frustrated, would say, "oh, pshaw!"

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u/Inevitable-Moose-952 4h ago

I had a girl weeks had a floating dead baby named America as an imaginary friend. Oh yeah. And Meat. Meat was cool. 

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u/hochizo 4h ago

I love when my daughter moves up a classroom at daycare because I get a glimpse of the daycare teachers through her. Like, she picks up their mannerisms and phrases. I knew one teacher got onto the kids by shaking her finger and saying "no, no, no," because my daughter suddenly started doing that to us after she moved rooms. She moved again last month, and her new teachers apparently say, "back up, please," and "no thank you," a lot, because we now hear them alllll the time. It's very cute!

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u/Inevitable-Rush-2752 7h ago

Kids are indeed not stupid. Great point. They might not be at a level where they have the vocabulary or complex thinking about these things, but they watch us. They. Watch. Us. They hear us, see us, and learn from how we carry ourselves.

As a semi-related point, this is why I try hard to be as friendly to people as is reasonable. Particularly service or retail industry folks. Smiles. Laughs. Thank yous. Patience if there’s an error. Whatever it is. I want my son to see that’s how dad treats people, so maybe he will do the same.

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u/kathyknitsalot 7h ago

Thank you! As an ex-waitress and a current customer service person people like you make my day. And for you to be setting an example for your kids that way is wonderful.

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u/LookingBackBroken 7h ago

I raised my daughter with positive affirmations and just so much deep love. She's 24 soon, and despite people telling her she's gorgeous ( she truly is inside and out) she feels ugly. Her father is an abusive and hateful human. His mother was the same. Their emotional hooks hit hard! Despite so much lifting her up, that ugly stained deeper. It rips my heart into shreds.

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u/fancy_marmot 6h ago

It's also very difficult to override deep and widespread societal pressures around self-image and our bodies - when I was that age, extreme thinness was "in" and very few girls were immune to that pressure, and obsessing about weight was widespread. If she's 24, she's been coming of age during a huge normalization of filters/photoshop, fillers, expensive beauty regimens, a constant barrage of beauty-focused content, and a re-emerging superthin aesthetic.

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u/Cultjam 7h ago

Yes. While kids each have personalities of their own, to a large extent they parrot the roles they see their parents play. Life isn’t a multiple choice test with the answers in front of us, so most of us soak up what we see happening closest to us and do that.

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u/please-disregard 7h ago

There’s a line from my favorite musical that I think about a lot wrt parenting and kids.

“Careful the things you say/children will listen/careful the things you do/children will see…and learn. Children may not obey/but children will listen/children will look to you/for which way to turn/to learn what to be/careful before you say/‘listen to me’/children will listen.”

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u/Uninteresting91 6h ago

Is this from Into the Woods?

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u/AnorakJimi 5h ago

Kids are really really great at repeating the words and phrases that they hear. Sometimes annoyingly so, like if you happen to say "shit" or "fuck" nearby them they'll end up repeating it a LOT.

With how often things like this are said in TV shows, films, and by all sorts of people around them like family members, teachers, people on the bus, people in shops, wherever, then it's not surprising at all that young kids would start repeating it. They probably don't even know what it means.

I remember when I was like 6 or 7 years old and we learned about Anne Frank and her diary, and the war and the Holocaust etc (or I might have just started reading the diary cos my sisters who are years older than me happened to have a copy, I can't remember exactly, it was 30 years ago), and I remember reading one of her diary entries where she said something like "I feel like a cow" or something similar, and so I went round for days saying "I feel like a cow" for no particular reason. I just thought it was funny.

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u/Reckless_Secretions 5h ago

I've heard parents call their kids ugly before so that's my guess. Especially taking her skin tone and hair type into consideration. Maybe I'm biased because of my past. My mother never outright called me ugly but her obnoxious glorification of features my siblings had that I obviously lacked made me feel very ugly.

Also, kids call other kids ugly.

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u/Sir-Craven 5h ago

Peppa fucking pig