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This blurs the line a bit with LadyBarbossa's recent thread, but a CS thread inspired this. Also, it's growing rather long.
The thread features a young woman shouting obscenities and demanding that her teacher allow her to ignore the lesson and talk with her friends in class. She's wholly oblivious to the disruption she causes, and isn't concerned for anything but her own amusement. The perfect little EW. And how does the mother respond during all of this?
"Please stop, dear"
"I know, dear"
"It isn't fair, honey"
And so forth. I've seen this in other places, most notably here. That one features a mother who buys her five kids a single Nintendo DS. Which works about as well as you'd expect. Now yes, she lays down some ground rules about it's use, but they're not enforced, at least not in any meaningful way. How does she respond? By asking the kids nicely and hiding the DS in her desk. Then go and get it out and play it anyway. So she hides it again. And they find it again.
Seriously? You let your kids blatantly ignore their punishment and dig around in your personal items in the process, and your entire response is "well don't do it this time?" And she wonders why they misbehave so badly.
The worst, though, I lost the link for. I think it may have been ad advice column, but the mother complained that her son would ignore everything she said and just play XBox all day. When someone told her she should take the XBox away, she responded with "I can't do that! He wouldn't like me then, and our friendship is important to me!"
Yeah, and that's why he isn't going to listen. He has zero respect for you. And that's basically the connecting thread through all of these. A parent who's so worried about maintaining a "good relationship" with their kid that they do jack to actually be an authority figure. Which means the kid will do whatever they want. That's an observation my manager made when she moved me up to FES - "You're not going to make any friends in this position."
There's a reason for that. Respect is like a fund - you can earn it and spend it, and getting someone to do something for you can rely on it. Let's put it this way: If the person considers their personal interests more important than the action, they aren't going to do it. If it's more important, they will (or if the two coincide). Respect tilts the equation in your favor. Things like "just because you're a friend/my dad/the Boss" is just saying that respect (for the friendship/family/employment) was the deciding factor.
And in all of the cases above, there was no respect to tip the scales. By letting the kids do whatever they wanted, the parent was relying entirely on it being in their kid's own interests to obey. And when that doesn't work and you've never built up a basis for respect, you have nothing to fall back on and these EW moments are the result.
...And I could have made that clearer and more compact, but I'm writing this way too early in the morning and lost half my original thoughts already.
The thread features a young woman shouting obscenities and demanding that her teacher allow her to ignore the lesson and talk with her friends in class. She's wholly oblivious to the disruption she causes, and isn't concerned for anything but her own amusement. The perfect little EW. And how does the mother respond during all of this?
"Please stop, dear"
"I know, dear"
"It isn't fair, honey"
And so forth. I've seen this in other places, most notably here. That one features a mother who buys her five kids a single Nintendo DS. Which works about as well as you'd expect. Now yes, she lays down some ground rules about it's use, but they're not enforced, at least not in any meaningful way. How does she respond? By asking the kids nicely and hiding the DS in her desk. Then go and get it out and play it anyway. So she hides it again. And they find it again.
Seriously? You let your kids blatantly ignore their punishment and dig around in your personal items in the process, and your entire response is "well don't do it this time?" And she wonders why they misbehave so badly.
The worst, though, I lost the link for. I think it may have been ad advice column, but the mother complained that her son would ignore everything she said and just play XBox all day. When someone told her she should take the XBox away, she responded with "I can't do that! He wouldn't like me then, and our friendship is important to me!"
Yeah, and that's why he isn't going to listen. He has zero respect for you. And that's basically the connecting thread through all of these. A parent who's so worried about maintaining a "good relationship" with their kid that they do jack to actually be an authority figure. Which means the kid will do whatever they want. That's an observation my manager made when she moved me up to FES - "You're not going to make any friends in this position."
There's a reason for that. Respect is like a fund - you can earn it and spend it, and getting someone to do something for you can rely on it. Let's put it this way: If the person considers their personal interests more important than the action, they aren't going to do it. If it's more important, they will (or if the two coincide). Respect tilts the equation in your favor. Things like "just because you're a friend/my dad/the Boss" is just saying that respect (for the friendship/family/employment) was the deciding factor.
And in all of the cases above, there was no respect to tip the scales. By letting the kids do whatever they wanted, the parent was relying entirely on it being in their kid's own interests to obey. And when that doesn't work and you've never built up a basis for respect, you have nothing to fall back on and these EW moments are the result.
...And I could have made that clearer and more compact, but I'm writing this way too early in the morning and lost half my original thoughts already.
She definitely didn't do me any favors with that attitude, that's for sure. 
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