Kids say the darndest things

Speaking of which I think we had a right of passage…explains “gay” to Opal as when a woman loves another woman (among other things) and she yelled out “I’m gay with mama!”

Then we got to try to explain romantic love…

oh dear lol

lol

save her kisses for her mama!

massive lols at this

this is the best thread. thank you all for sharing.

My boy, who is neurodiverse and then some bless him, is the prince of daft questions. I should have kept a log over the years but as it's getting hot, I keep thinking about this beauty.

'What does sunblock do?'

Not to over-explain but I can't honestly think of a better example of economy of language in action.

Good question imo. Does it sun the block or block the sun? Not obvious. Sometimes the verb goes first: pickpocket, scarecrow.

(Older kid, smiling:) “Daddy, I just ate 50 chips…. do you think I’ll throw up?”

One day of summer break down; how many to go?

He was asking earlier what's the difference btw. a dog pound and an animal shelter – me: I guess nothing, a pound is just an older name for the same thing – him: "Yeah, and we don't even use pounds in the United States, we use dollars." I thought that was kinda funny.

lol that's great

I'm sitting here trying to work at the computer; he's flipping through these I SURVIVED books he borrowed from a friend. Then he keeps coming over and asking me things like: Daddy... Who - or what - attacked New York on September 11, 2001?

Can we, like, have that conversation a little later; and not right at this moment when I'm trying to get this email out, please?

daddy? can jet fuel really melt steel beams?

The boy was cracking me up the other night, saying how embarrassing it would have been for the first pilot had he missed and just gone between the two towers.

"Yes, son, I suppose he would have had some egg on his face."

encourage all parents to tell their kids who weren't born on 9/11 that it's ok to be funny about it

He brought it up again at bedtime (so I had to get into it) – he noted that 2001 was a year before Super Mario Sunshine came out, which I guess is a good yardstick.

It led into talking about other some heavy world history stuff that we had already addressed in a few difficult (for me) but ultimately good conversations around a year ago. He seems to have forgotten most of those details, though, so we had to go over it again. He was more ready to process some of the complexities/ambiguities this time around anyway (as best as I could touch on them in an age-appropriate way).

I never really anticipated having to explain, say, the Cold War as part of my parenting duties, and it’s not the most fun thing… hopefully I’m doing OK at it.

Living through a Donald Trump presidency really accelerated how much my kids learned about politics, the world outside their bubble, etc. Both for better and for worse - probably good to rip the band aid off early about the government being a source of good and having your best interests at heart; otoh, my daughter had a recurring nightmare for a bit where they were under lockdown at school and Donald Trump was the terrorist in the halls shooting.

I remember having to have these conversations - prompted by the attacks in Paris. It was horrible to have to let the awfulness of the world in like that and it led to difficult conversations about ideologies etc. I remember my boy processing 9/11 and saying 'well, they must have had their reasons' and a little bit of me breaking.

There is an evergreen dilemma as a parent between wanting my kids to understand the world with clear eyes, and not wanting to crush their souls. And I'm not even that cynical a person

Climate change is a really big one too

(xp just typed the below, but LS said it much more succinctly)

Yeah it's really hard...

With regard to the wars & "foreign policy" stuff - he's young enough to not really have much of a sense yet of what gov't does (especially in that area) - so I'm trying to give a clear-eyed sense of things, without entirely dwelling on the negative (b/c that feels wrong too, and I don't want him to feel hopeless or cynical). For a sophisticated adult, it naturally feels like anything you may say comes with a caveat or counter-example; but I don't want to keep going down rabbit-holes with an 8-year-old... I feel you have to find a way to address a few basic themes and be truthful without overburdening him.

Yes, that is a huge part of it - it's not always that I want to shelter kids from harsh truths, but harsh truths inherently have a lot of nuance, and often that level of complexity is beyond them.

and I'm not that cynical a person either - if anything I probably reflexively focus on the "good side" too much - but I'm wary of "indoctrinating" him too far in either direction, before he's able to learn & think about this stuff for himself... especially around topics that have huge bodies of historical scholarship and competing theories around basic points, or whatever.

I try to end conversations like that with what we do to help eg. “and that’s why I volunteer at a food bank” or “and that’s why it’s important to speak up when we see people being treated unfairly” or “and that’s why it’s important to buy things that aren’t made of plastic” or whatever. I don’t know if it helps the 7-y-o to end on a note of hope but it makes me feel better about having these soul-crushing discussions.

I like that - kind of the positive version of the George Bluth Sr. thing.

“j cole is an o.g.”

I think my kid is a boomer in training—
We were listening to a Billie Eilish song on the car radio
“Why isn’t she really singing? Why is she just mumbling? She’s probably scared to sing loud because she has a bad voice. Why do they let people who can’t sing on the radio? I don’t want to listen to music. Can we listen to the news?”

My kid said the other day that he thinks “rock music” is “the worst kind of music”…

I would chalk this up as a failure as a parent, but I already know he’s not going to be a music head (which is fine by me).

tell yr kid to meet me in the parking lot >:(

lol

Ha ha!

Now he just told me (in the car), “We don’t want to listen to your middle-aged man music!”

(ironically, this meant swapping a R&B playlist for “Octopus’s Garden”)

lol

irony not identified

"did you know that glenn danzig is 66 years old?"

My friend overhears his daughter playing:

"In THIS hairdressers we can make you bald in one minute"

My 23-month/old daughter keeps saying “I love you p…” (my real name starts with p) and then she takes a pause and says “…pigeons”

psych

My kid (the older one) asked if “one dog can marry another dog if they’re not owned by the same person”

[stroking chin emoji]

surely a matter for the courts to decide

Yesterday, I walked into a little country town via the church graveyard. There was a family of three among the stones and I heard the little girl say, to what I assume was her dad, 'how can you fall asleep forever, daddy?' A look passed between me and the dad, somewhere between 'how in the hell do I answer that?' and 'help!' but I figured this one was for him and kept going.

woooof

My 3 yr old niece has been raised in a trilingual household.

We're looking at a picture book together:

Me (pointing at a picture of a sock): What's that?

Niece (clearly trolling): A rucksack

Me: Very funny. I think you know that's a sock. How do you say sock en Español?

Niece: Paco!

(Later)
Me: Teach me how to count en Español because I don't know it very well. I know it goes Uno, dos, tres...

Niece (clearly tired of my inane line of questioning): Quattro, cinquo, PACO!

lol

When my daughter was somewhere between 2 and 3 probably we went to the Cloisters, a castle that was transplanted to New York City and we walked in a room that had a bunch of ancient caskets of knights and whatnot and Opal just yelled out "look they're all sleeping!" and I said "yes, sleeping".

When my sister was around the same age we went to Shaw's Garden (Missouri Botanical Garden) in St. Louis. There is a mausoleum and tomb for the garden's founder, Henry Shaw:

https://i1.wp.com/discoverandshare.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/henry-shaw-mausoleum-e1507058518410.jpeg?fit=1194%2C1200&ssl=1

My sister was informed that Shaw was dead, and this was his tomb. She processed that information, then said: "Okay, but... why did they paint him white?"

We watched the 1978 Superman movie the other night. There's a scene where a bunch of pedestrians crowd around a window to watch Superman on a tv screen. My son says, "A long time ago, when they made this, people didn't have televisions in their houses. If they wanted to watch tv they had to stand in the street outside a store."

I'm now trying to think when the last time was that I saw an electronics store which just had a bunch of tvs in the display that anybody could watch from the sidewalk, or indeed if I ever saw one outside of a movie or tv show.

Yeah, no kidding.

I mean, it must've been something to see at midnight when all the TVs played the national anthem and then turned into static.

Would surely have turned them all off when the shop closed at 5pm?

In the movies, it seems like the crowd shows up after hours!

If the TVs at the TV store weren't on, you had to find that dive where they always had a TV behind the bar tuned into the news - then you had to tell the bartender to turn it up so you could hear the story that would advance the plot for you.