Tag: kids

“Go Right Ahead” Parenting

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Have you ever found yourself asking another parent to – well, parent – their kid, and they refused?

Here’s a great article about that “undeparenting” phenomenon, which is as bad – if not worse – than helicopter parenting.

However, too few parents seem to be preparing their children to be successful as human beings. An essential element of this is instilling empathy. The word derives from the German word einfühlung—“feeling into”—and it’s at the root of good manners. It involves caring about how another person is feeling and being motivated to help them feel better, which often requires compromising on your own needs and desires.

The author calls it “go right ahead” mommying, as it indulges the kid’s every whim, regardless of how it might be affecting others around them.

This isn’t about kids who are having legitimate tantrums or meltdown – every parent has experienced that embarrassment when your kid screams bloody murder in a public place while you’re just, I don’t know, trying to buy a pair of shoes. This is, instead, about kids who are behaving rudely and, when asked by strangers to stop, the parent and kid refuse.

It’s ok to demand that your kids act respectfully and to teach them empathy. It helps prevent them from growing up to be assholes.

Racist Assault at a Cheektowaga Dollar General (Update)

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Do you know this woman? 

She’s got some interesting views on race. Put another way, this is on the front page of Reddit as of Wednesday morning. 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqdCWpUmP-Y]

My favorite part is when she’s on the phone (depicted above) with, ostensibly, her husband and rhetorically asks, (around 2:30) “oh, he knows the cops? How many cops have I stripped for? “

This woman is not only allowed to walk the streets of Cheektowaga, she’s got two kids in front of whom she’s yelling “ni**er” at a Black man whose only offense was to start his car when her boy was nearby, apparently startling him. 

Maybe we can set aside the facile Buffalo exceptionalism for a moment and revisit the idea that our people are no better or worse, necessarily, than those anywhere else in the United States. Perhaps instead of “everything is awesome”, we can use incidents such as these to identify and treat a racist cancer plaguing a place that has acute resentments borne out of ignorance and economic hardship. 

This woman is a symptom of a much larger problem that our #Buffalove tends too often to brush aside. 

UPDATE: She called in to WBLK to defend herself. We learn: 

1. Her name is “Janelle Ambrosia”; 

2. She’s having a very bad day; 

3. The man who took the video “almost hit” her kid with his car, but did not hit anyone with anything; 

4. The man who took the video allegedly called her a “crackhead cracker”; 

5. She thinks that someone shouldn’t be able to post videos – “ex-specially” of her kids – on YouTube; and

6. She is unapologetic – “what am I supposed to do? Apologize?”