‘Respect should be earned, not expected’
Getting children to do as they are told is something we enforce as soon as possible. To save them from getting hurt or to generally keep them safe and follow rules.
Where do we stop though? At what point do we let them start making their own decisions, develop their own moral compass?
Why do we think that we should have all of the control when it comes to children? I know we don’t want them to be disrespectful little s**ts but I think many people think it’s acceptable to enforce power over children due to their own insecurities.
Why should it always be ‘respect your elders’? Shouldn’t we just teach them to respect everyone equally?
I’ve met some “adults” who think it’s perfectly acceptable to order children around and push them about just because they’re younger than them, to me that’s a prefect example of bullying. These so called adults think they deserve respect from the children, well, respect should be earned not expected.
Children learn behaviours from their surrounding adults, so if you treat them badly and talk to them like they are crap, don’t be surprised when they talk back to you like that. You are not better than them just because you are older, you don’t have the right to be first or have any reason to be heard over them, you’re not more important and you’re most definitely not always right.
This is not the Victorian era, it is the 21st Century, to quote Whitney Houston ‘I believe children are the future’, which of course they are.
There is also this weird thing that people do when they ‘re out and about with their children. They apologise for them, as though they are a nuisance. I will hold my hands up and admit I have done this in the past but I quickly realised that my child is of course not an inconvenience. He is a human and has every right to occupy any space in which he pleases. Yes children can be extremely noisy and annoying and I’m all for child free places and quiet zones on public transport but children are noisy, they always will be. I’m not condoning rudeness and giving them free rein to be obnoxious but generally children will create heightened sounds.
Older humans think that children should move for them, they also think it’s acceptable to push in front of them when children are waiting patiently in queues. The amount of times this has happened to my son is disgusting. And he wouldn’t say anything because he’s polite. Although it might be a different story now, not that he’s not polite, he’s just bigger than everyone and it’s not as easy to pretend you haven’t noticed him.
I don’t know if I’ve gone slightly off topic here and just started to ramble, which I’ll admit does happen with many of my blog posts…but it’s all about my random wonderingments so sometimes I will just type exactly what I’m thinking 😉
Made A Hames 