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I work at a pet store. I monitor anyone that looks between 12 and 18 closely. If I don’t, without fail they’re always the ones swatting at our animals for a laugh. Why, by Neptune’s briny piss, would I treat them with the respect that 9/10 times they don’t show to anyone else?
I remember my thoughts and feelings at 15, when I had no responsibilities, no understanding of how the world works, no awareness of my own flaws, and yet I knew everything. It was a blissful existence.
I remember being 15 and I had severe tooth pain and my parents refused to take me to a dentist for a year straight because teeagers are just whiny and dramatic. I ended up having four teeth removed. Lol
This kind of thing resonates with me and then I check the comments and it’s just people being like “god young people are so STUPID lol” and it hurts a bit!
I’m sad that so many people had such a shit time being 15.
I had a great time being 15. Back then I couldn’t even fathom being twenty, it felt like being old and I was never getting old (or so my 15yo self thought)
If you have to try not to forget that you’re probably already a cunt. Having open eyes is enough.
Nah, I was a shitter at 15. I know now that the thoughts and feelings I had held no real water and I was just an idiot. Now, with everything I’ve learned and experienced, I would absolutely tell my 15 year old self to sit down and stfu.
Hello fellow shithead. I am 37 now, I have two kids, and my biggest worry is identifying the shitty, stupid behaviors I had as a kid, and trying to find them in my own kids, and figuring out what, if anything, I can do to prevent them from making the stupid mistakes I made. They are not even close to 15 at this point, so I’ve got some years to prepare.
That’s not today that I don’t at least appreciate, just a little, what the OP is saying. I can’t forget that my kids are humans with their own ideas. I don’t want to stifle their creativity and their growth. But what they cannot possibly understand, and what I’m continuing to learn to this day, is just how big an impact some small decisions can have.
“I’m 20 and this is deep”.
Become an actual adult and you will realize how ridiculously difficult it is to take some uneducated teenager’s radicalism with any grain of seriousness and respect. Even if you try to because you remember what it felt like not to be taken seriously, and you don’t want to be that adult…
“I’m the cool mom …”
Isn’t that completely missing the point of this post? 15-20 is old enough to have some experience, opinions, thoughts, hopes, fears, dreams, etc.
I’m way over 20 and I wholeheartly disagree with you. It is indeed complicated to educate rebelling teenagers but many adults look down on children, teens and young adults just because of them being younger. That is an acceptable behavior.
Even when struggling to educate someone, it’s not ok to treat someone like they are worth nothing. Younger human are human being and deserve to be treated as so.I’m 35, and I’m perfectly able to engage with the thought process behind the opinion, no matter how radical. All they want is to be treated with respect.
Contrast with “real adults” who e.g. continue to trash the planet because they can’t even think of slightly decreasing the amount by which they enrich themselves. Those I don’t respect. They are the real radicals.
If a 15 year old says “so much good can happen when a few billionaires kick the bucket”, I’m right there with them.
The type of kids you’re describing is not what “I’m x age and this is deep” is talking about.
Man, that is not what most 15 year olds are saying. You have an idealized fantasy in your head. Most of them are just spewing obscenities, racism and stupid incel/manosphere shit over discord. Just like we were over IRCs, ventrillo and TeamSpeak.
Most kids are fucking stupid.
I had Climate Change anxiety when I was 15. I’m an adult now and I have crippling Climate Change anxiety and can’t do anything without feeling guilty. I hate the adults that sabotage my education because they decided I had a learning disability. If anyone said problematic shit, it was my conservative history teacher.
Well thank goodness the US just elected a person and party that are totally dedicated to climate change mitigation! And our political process in general is well oiled and poised for real meaningful change! And the American people all acknowledge the existence of the problem and in no way deny it, and are all united in fighting the clear and present danger it poises!
My history teacher would be proud. He wont have to worry about those pesky wealthfare queens or illegal immigrants anymore.
I don’t think the average person on lemmy, with a diagnosed learning disability or other challenges (autism in my case), represent the average opinion of 15 year old children.
Judging by the state of the world, I don’t think the average adult has any right to have a feeling of smug superiority to teenagers. I don’t think there’s really that much difference between average teenagers and average adults.
Counterpoint: grow up and learn to say no to your 15 year old self. “I’m just a kid and life is a nightmare!” is only a waypoint on the path to maturity, and immaturity is poorly disguised by pleas to “please somebody think of the children!” Children are welcome to have all their own thoughts and feelings, but having thoughts and feelings doesn’t entitle or qualify anybody to amplify them into leadership and policy.
Man… The amount of comments saying that kids are dumb at fifteen and I didn’t know what I was doing at fifteen are all falsely equating respect with success and knowledge. Kids literally don’t know what their doing because they are figuring it out. They’re not dumb, they have a lot to learn. And most want to.
Kids need respect for being who they are. You give most kids real respect and watch them do everything they can to live up to it. They need real connection and mentors. When you give high support then you can set high expectations.
The difference is you knowing that you don’t know, and an average teenager feeling like they know it all, while they know about as much as nothing.
You’ve got it all backwards. Adults are the ones who think they know everything. Don’t mistake confidence for arrogance. If you raise a kid right, then they’ll confidently do dumb shit, knowing they’ll learn from it and you’ll keep them safe. That’s healthy development. But you look at the adults who never take risks, never consider different ideas, refuse to learn tech or politics because they think they won’t get it. That’s low self esteem, but it’s also a form of arrogance. The arrogant belief that you are already the best you can possibly be. That you have no growing left to do. Even if you think you’re the dumbest person alive, thinking you’re the smartest version of yourself is arrogance.
It’s all the Dunning-Kruger effect. We are cursed to continually fail on the side of you don’t know what you don’t know.
I had this idea in my teens that we really needed a common sense brigade. Small groups of people jury style that would just go from place to place and say hey that’s stupid Don’t do that. Because I could see right from wrong I assumed that we just needed a bunch of people that could also see right from wrong to go around and lead the idiots to reasonable decisions. It was very easy for my 15-year-old mine to see black and white everywhere. It’s all good versus evil and smart versus stupid.
Many decades later, I know grasp that most of the world’s problems are because people tries to fit everything into black and white.
Kids need respect
no, kids need understanding. respect is earned. the difference between the two is trust.
You talk like all the adults that made life hell when I was 15. If anyone has to “earn” respect, it’s adults who forgot what it’s like to live under someone else’s thumb.
you talk like a petulant child that was never pushed to achieve more than you thought you were capable of.
how’s that feel?
I remember every moment of my life. I remember being 10 months old laying in my crib smelling the herb garden out the window. I remember my parents never showing up to any of my school events. I remember the way the belt across my back and thighs felt when my father got home from a “hard day”. I remember spending the weekend in jail because I was doing something my father made me do.
fuck you, asshole.
I never earned respect from them while they were alive. I didn’t even get any understanding from them. I only got yelled at, hit, and verbally abused when they felt they were losing control of their own life. respect is earned through proving you can be trusted with mature tasks. understanding should be given. understanding that a child may know to take out the trash but not know the importance of it. this makes it difficult for them to prioritize and objectively complete goals.
children need understanding from adults, to provide guidance that allows them to grow on their own power and lean on when they need support.
next time you want to attack someone based on who they are, take the entitled prick out of your mouth before you speak, asshole.
I never earned respect from them while they were alive
You shouldn’t have had to. They should have loved and respected you unconditionally.
Respect is granted for just being human. That can be erode if they violate core social norms, but when respect is given trust is given back. They then give the effort that results in learning.
respect for life is not respect for the individual.
trust must exist before respect is given. let me give you an example.
a cop pulls you over, you were not breaking any laws that you were aware of. the officer walks up and asks you if you know why you were pulled over. you tell him no and he proceeds to tell you that you were speeding.
you know this was a lie since you had speed control on.
did you respect the officer before or after he pulled you over?
did your level of respect change before or after he lied to you?
in my case, I never respected the officer. I understand that he’s doing a job and will help however I can. However, after he lies to me I could never trust him, thus I could never respect him.
my point is, In order for respect to exist, trust must be present first. I don’t trust strangers, even if they’re in positions of public trust.
You are right though. Respect and trust correlate to each other and fortify each other. The more trust you have in someone, the more respect you have for them, the more respect you have for someone, the more trust you have in them.
I can still trust somebody, but I can still not respect them. that relationship cannot be flipped around.
Teenagers are in development of becoming an individual. They may behave personalities, but they haven’t tempered them for society yet. That tempering process is through human connections. I’d argue the best outcomes come through respect, patient connections with adults who demonstrate composure and allow them to grow that composure.
I don’t know what you’re suggesting other than with holding respect.
Teenagers are in development of becoming an individual. They may behave personalities, but they haven’t tempered them for society yet.
that’s exactly my point. I understand they have to be tempered by society. Once they have achieved this level of tempering it’s respectable for the amount of effort they put in. some people though, never get through that tempering and I cannot respect them. I understand they may have social anxiety or some other reason, but I can’t trust them like others that have so I can’t respect them like others. there are other ways to respect though.
I’d argue the best outcomes come through respect, patient connections with adults who demonstrate composure and allow them to grow that composure.
IMO that’s not respect, thats understanding. If you respected them, you would at least seem them as equals to yourself and treat them as an equal. You understand they aren’t at the same level as yourself and give them some leeway to “feel it out” and find their own path. this includes supporting them when they make mistakes or explaining how to avoid the mistakes in the future.
I don’t know what you’re suggesting other than with holding respect.
respect is a gift given from one individual to another. it signifies the trust one has in the other. A child respects a parent because they trust the parent. when the trust is broken, the respect dies with it. infact, respect of an adult is important to the development of a young mind and is a mechanism used to emulate the adult. if you respect someone, you might want to try being like them, even when you’re an adult.
so in short, I disagree that respect should be given automatically. It’s earned through nurturing relationships and built on trust.
I don’t respect cops to begin with. If I didn’t know they were a cop then I would respect them.
because you don’t trust them, right?
I do not
all this bullshit about taking their phones away…they have to wake up at 7am for school and be there all day, they can’t even have one bit of joy? they can’t do banter during class or record a lecture or look stuff up? why are we acting like school has to be strict because it has to seem strict
The older I get the more I think school and college are the way they are for aesthetics more than effective education. And having gone back to college after earning a flight instructor certificate has convinced me at least some professors haven’t so much as looked up the word “learn” in a dictionary.
15 year olds are idiots. But like so are my coworkers. The difference is that 15 year olds have an excuse and might learn from their fuck ups.
Pretty much this. I’ve always tried to treat kids like dumb lil adults, but with more potential!
I was working as a flight instructor in my early 20’s. I’d occasionally get “So, how long have you been…flying?” from new students I was meeting for the first time. “Oh, since about 9 this morning” was my usual response.
That shit usually stopped after about 20 minutes in the air. They’d try level turns or even leveling off at altitude and slosh all over the sky, then I’d hook a pinkie on the stick* and the plane would magically straighten right out. You could feel the moment they realized “Oh, this kid genuinely is qualified for this job,” and man was that satisfying. Youth does not equal useless.
*This plane had a single stick in between the seats, and for training an extension would be added above the grip so the student and instructor can hold the controls at the same time. It meant if I touched the stick students usually saw me do it.
Not if I abort them first
Was that supposed to stop after 15?
Because as a woman-type creature, that’s has been the whole life experience so far…
And I’m more than twice that age now…
My mother stopped using intimidation to get her way after I became aggressive at 23.
Going chimp is the only way so far that works for setting and enforcing boundaries. Some people shouldn’t be treated as human, but as ape. Watching nature documentaries helped me learn how to deal with pos family members.
Umm, I’m just imagining someone still living off the parents who’s screaming like a monkey because his mother asked him to shower once this week. Like what kind of relationship are you allowing to continue where intimidation is effective? If you’re reliant on the person, I could understand not feeling like you could set boundaries before. But if you’re a healthy functional adult, you shouldn’t have to resort to “Going chimp”. Just like… live your life. Let them know you’re not gonna respond immediately to drama. Give them some distance and minimal effective communication so they know the point (not being an ass, but letting them know that you’re an adult with your own situations going on much like they’ve gone through and they’re burdening you now instead of supporting).
I only treat her like a chimp. I tried every advice the psychotherapist gave and nothing worked.
I wanted to move out, but she and my father insisted that work/school balance was extremely difficult and expensive. It wasn’t back then. They were both just lonely and didn’t want to lose their pet child. I ran from home at 21.
That first conflict at 23yo, was because my childhood cat died from inaction. My sister and I were visiting her and my sister noticed him being sluggish and weak. His breathing sounded laboured. So we booked an appointment at the vet. An hour or so later, he stumbled in gasping for breath and meowing weakly in between. We rushed him to the nearest vet clinic, but he didn’t make it.
He had a persistent cough for months leading up to it, but since we only visited her on occasion, we didn’t realise. In hindsight, her complaining about the cat pooping indoors and refusing to climb over the fence to a spot the neighbourhood dedicated to outdoor cats, should have raised alarm bells. I failed him.
Two days or so after his passing, I tried talking to my mother about what signs to look for and when to take pets to the vet. As always, she needs to have her way and tried to brush me off. Over and over I kept trying her to focus to no avail. For the first time, I saw red and seeing fear in her eyes. I did not get physical though, even though I would probably have had she continued to brush me off and shift blame of Timo’s death on me.
Needless to say, nothing changed. Another cat died from possibly a heart condition she ignored when the cat “seemed exhausted and too tired to walk” on their daily evening stroll. “He went limb when I picked him up.” Adding to it she mentioned how he seemed fin the next day, so she let him outside. 3 days later he was found under a bush, long dead. There probably wasn’t anything we could do to save him, but the fact she just ignored it despite undrrstanding he became unwell. is just how impossible it is to get her to do anything outside her whims. Mind you, I pay the vet bills. So it wasn’t even her money she’d be spending on a visit!
To this day, pets to her are just something to have to fill loneliness. Adopted a cat with PTSD, which she knew about before agreeing. She wanted to “get rid of him” because he was “stupid and retarded.” Pawn him off over a hand-me-down website or to a shelter. Chimp mode is what made her keep the cat. Threatning her with animal protection and that I would make sure she’d never have pets again, is what worked. Reasoning did not.
The cat is doing well now. He still has PTSD, but he loves the outdoors and after weeks of feeding him, he becomes cuddly with you. He also loves my mom now, so she is happy about it too. It took 2-3 months of gradually building his trust.
My mom has always used fear to get her way. When we were young, she’d use a belt to dicipline us. When my sister was 4, she beat her till bruising with a stick for walking away. She walked away after my mother left her alone to sit on a chair for 30min. A 4 year old cannot wait that long.
As we got older, she added manipulative tactics. Though she used different methods, implying violence while shifting blame was her go-to method. Kept us docile and we thought we had deserved it. As she also brought us up in a cult that believed in karma. Our dad was a coward and avoided every conflict with her.
That programming doesn’t just go away. And “simply living your life” back then seemed impossible. My sister, our dad and I are all close to no contact. I only ever talk to her when she needs help. I despise her, but I also know her history and what made her so cruel. Last time I was there was when the neighbourhood has a gas leak problem. So they were without heating. Brought her my electric heater and taught her how to use it. I hate her, but letting the old bitch sleep in the cold is going too far. Hadn’t spoken with her in 4 months by that time.
She doesn’t respect boundaries. Never takes no for an answer and guilt trips you if you’re not careful. So my sister and I speak out, she doesn’t respect it and always starts pressing our buttons to get her way. At which point, I walk away.
My sister avoids all contact nowadays after she threw a rock hard loaf of “spelt” bread at our mom. Our mom deserved it after trying to ridicule and emotionally hurt my sister. Implying she was stupid for not listening to our mother’s endless commands. That she had deserved it when her sunglasses fell off the table. Which fell off the table because our mother had pushed them off by accident after placing her bag on the table.
Chimp mode is what we call losing our patience and seeking conflict. I got physical thankfully only once after she had locked the front door and I didn’t have a key to open it to get out. All because she wanted me to stay for lunch and followed me around trying to convince me to stay. I tried to walk away after she tried to paint my dad in a bad light for “wanting to abort me.” Which I already knew. What got me livid was the complete disrespect towards me in the way she said it, brushed me off and gave multiple improv bullshit reasons when I pressed for details. I knew that she wasn’t telling the whole story and that there was a reason she’d casually mention it point blank.
In hindsight she only said it because she was jelous that my dad and I were getting closer (he was an absent father).
Only recently I found out that she did have an abortion. She aborted my older brother because she didn’t want a son. She was and still is that controlling.
She’ll never change. At best, she might be able to learn something. I made progress with her, and found a way to get her attention and be receptive. The opposite of chimp mode if you will. Takes a lot of energy and it’s like navigating a minefield. The recent year my life’s had more shit than I could handle. I do not have the energy or mental fortitude to tolerate her enough to try to improve our relationship again. 5 minutes ot teaching her how to use the heater was too much already.
Effective communication does not exist with people who have 0 attention span and unwillingness to cooperate. Probably due to some form undiagnosed ADHD and personality disorder(s). We think PTSD and something in the borderline corner. It’s why we think aggression/hostility/direct conflict is the only thing she responds to. The only thing that gets her to back off. Chimp mode protects.
Yeah mate I don’t have that option. “Going ape/chimp” at my size and general demeanor just looks like impotent rage, because it is. What is a 5 foot nothing going to do against anyone as far as boundary enforcement? (I used to wrestle, I know how to throw myself around, and I know I don’t stand a chance if most people call my bluff, but I’m fierce until you do call said bluff)
And the people aren’t family, but society as a whole. My family is all dead and doesn’t matter. Until she died, my mom was my most vocal advocate, that woman loved everything I represented that she could never be but wanted. But I haven’t had her since I was 23, and I’m almost 40 now so…
Having a baby face+being short will also do that to ya. Like, brother, we are the same damn age, why are you treating me like a child
Man I bet, that shit is rough. I’m also super short (two standard deviations below average for my a/s/l) and it just never stops being a thing.
I’m actually thankful for all my gray hair so people stop treating me like a goddamned child. The gray has its own drawbacks ofc, but I don’t care anymore, just don’t treat me like a kid.
