How do you teach an 8yo the difference between other kids just getting on his nerves vs. harassing him? Yesterday at the pool a slightly older boy was trying to talk to my son, and I saw my son saying “Please stop. I don’t like that,” as we’ve taught him to do when someone is bothering him. I saw him repeat some version of this statement several times before he got out of the pool and told me he wanted to leave. As we were leaving, I asked what the boy had done (as I hadn’t seen or heard any obvious offense). My son said the other boy had been speaking to him in “memes” (slang terms like skibidi, sigma, gyatt, etc.), and he didn’t like it because kids who talk like that have “brain rot” (a term he learned from school/YouTube).🤦🏻‍♀️ (Some context: My son is an only child with no cousins his age. His father and I try to get him as much time with other kids as possible outside of school, but he still spends the majority of his time with us and other adult relatives. Because of this, he’s become used to people with very polished social skills always doing their best to get along with him. Kids his age, by contrast, are still learning how to get along with other people, and don’t always extend the courtesies my son is used to getting from adults.) His dad and I tried to talk to him about why the boy was within his rights to talk however he wanted, provided it wasn’t mean or vulgar. My 8yo rejected this notion because the boy’s speech bothered him, and he asked him to stop, so he should have. He kept saying that if someone asked *him* to stop, he would have. There was more to the discussion, but my son became upset with frustration and wound up in tears because he felt he was right and we weren’t understanding his reasoning. So how would you explain to an 8yo other people’s rights to be annoying to us, and that the their unwillingness to accommodate our preferences isn’t always mean/harassment?

Posted by jtoxx at 2024-06-23 16:20:13 UTC