@tomie during lockdowns when schools were shut down i heard so many parents complain, in front of their kids, that they had to spend time with them.

i'm not saying that you can't get frustrated with your kid, or anything like that, because i'm sure that's inevitable. but i do think that as the adult you should be very careful and considerate about how you treat them because they are sponges and will soak up every little thing you do and say. i don't think it leads to healthy development to do stuff like ignore them and then yell at them. or complain about spending time with them. or give them commands without being polite. for example, what i say today: "move! go!" vs "hey kiddo would you please step out of the way so i can put the groceries up on the belt?" if the kids doesn't listen the first time then maybe you can get a bit more assertive, right? but working retail i see parents do this *all the time*.

you can teach your kid the right way to act but your actions are going to speak louder than your words, even if subconsciously. i didn't trust my parents with shit because they were constantly breaching my trust/privacy and respect, and that's not something i thought through, it's just something that happened. i learned extremely well how to lie and manipulate my way around things because of that and had to decode it from myself over years to the point where i probably think about it too much now. i think parents being complacent or overzealous in the wrong areas is a pretty big problem. i mean, fuck, all of my siblings and all of my close friends have made attempts on their own lives and i think i can always draw it back to parental failings.

there is definitely a difference in the amount of time spent with children between mothers and fathers, and that difference widens during the summer. but i also see moms who handle it really well and their children are well behaved and happy, more often than not actually. just out of the ones who do treat their children kind of poorly in these circumstances, they tend to be women.

what prompted this was just that i saw it happen on 3 different occasions yesterday and they were all women who were ignoring their kids when they were talking to them and then snapped at them in a rude way. and that was in the span of 3 hours ;_;

i've said it before too, but i acknowledge that i probably wouldn't be a perfect parent, that's impossible. a lot of these things just seem like no-brainers to me, though. i just see kids kind of being cast aside, ignored, pushed around, etc. pretty often and it makes me sad... because it's more or less "normalized abuse." people don't really think about children being abused emotionally, whether actively or passively.