Kids say the darndest things

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.

Geezer alert! Having a tv turned on in the display window of the small shop on main street actually was a thing for a while, back when televisions were still full of vacuum tubes. When I was very young I actually remember accompanying my dad on a Saturday morning to a small shop that had a "tube tester".

When your television abruptly stopped working you had to open the back, remove a variety of tubes, put them into a paper sack and go plug them into the tester to see which one(s) had gone bad. Then you asked a man at a counter, who'd disappear into the stock room and come back with a tube of the right type, of which there were hundreds, all identified only by a stock number that differentiated them by plug-type, size, and other technical characteristics. Then you'd bring the paper bag home, put all the tubes back in, turn it on and hope it worked.

Superman originated in the vacuum tube era, so the mid-80s movies were a bit self-consciously anachronistic.

NERVOUS MAN: "Hey, bartender! Turn up that volume, will ya?"

BARTENDER *slowly looks at TV and then back at NERVOUS MAN*

BARTENDER: "It's 2005! Can't you read the captions like everyone else?"

“I don’t like strawberry lemonade. Hope that doesn’t offend anyone.”

There's a kid in my son's class named Ryan. This year, there's also a kid in school who supposedly kind of looks like Ryan – my son and his friends call him "Rip-Off Ryan." There's also a younger, shorter kid (my son says he's like "when you make a copy of a copy") – they call him "Double Rip-Off Ryan." As for Ryan himself, they call him "Real-Deal Ryan." My wife and I think all this is pretty funny.

The other day we were with a friend named Lindsay and I brought up that we were reading Encyclopedia Brown and our friend said "oh I remember that, I loved Encyclopedia Brown as a kid" and Opal (4.5) said "Lindsay...do you like encyclopedias?" and she said "yes I do" and Opal said "do you like dinosaurs?" and Lindsay said "I do!" and Opal said "well then you know what you should get? You should get a dinosaur encyclopedia. I have one it's great."

Something about that just cracked me up.

["Some Kinda Love" by the VU is playing]

8yo: "Like a dirty French novel"? Who comes up with the metaphors in these songs?

Me: In this case, the singer-songwriter himself.

8yo: Well, this one must have been a bit cuckoo, because that is a terrible metaphor.

[Then we had a frank discussion about metaphors and similes]

That reminds me of my almost 7 year old who was briefly obsessed with “Humpty Dance” this summer and was asking things like “how busy can you actually get in a Burger King bathroom?”

There's a kid in my son's class named Ryan. This year, there's also a kid in school who supposedly kind of looks like Ryan – my son and his friends call him "Rip-Off Ryan." There's also a younger, shorter kid (my son says he's like "when you make a copy of a copy") – they call him "Double Rip-Off Ryan." As for Ryan himself, they call him "Real-Deal Ryan." My wife and I think all this is pretty funny.

― juristic person (morrisp), Tuesday, October 19, 2021 1:34 AM (eleven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I love this. I do wonder what the various Ryans think of all this. I want a TV show of all this.

Rip Off Ryan In The Middle

That reminds me of my almost 7 year old who was briefly obsessed with “Humpty Dance” this summer and was asking things like “how busy can you actually get in a Burger King bathroom?”

― joygoat, Tuesday, October 19, 2021 12:55 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

These are the questions

i feel that TV show is already bob's burgers!

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/bobsburgerpedia/images/8/8d/Regular-Rudy.jpg

came home from work yesterday, Opal runs up to me.

"daddy, daddy I have to tell you something.

I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that I found a penny!

The bad news is that I lost it."

quite the rollercoaster! <3

my 6 YO just got his covid shot today. I'd been telling him that he would get a Blizzard (from DQ) afterwards. apparently in school he was telling the teachers and other kids he was getting a lizard today

Was he disappointed?