Crying When a Dish Breaks

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And that's another reason why childhood is the most rotten time in a person's life (although middle school comes pretty damn close): People think your misery is cute!! ! And just like people don't expect a "cute puppy" to save pull them out of a fire, they also view kids' misery as "not real". I'm so glad I'm an adult now, and people actually take me seriously.

What makes it a thousand times worse is that a kid doesn't have alcohol and tobacco to turn to when the misery becomes too much. (You have no idea how happy I was when I learned to sneak sips without my parents noticing; I was 12.) Of course, if I did, I'd have exhausted the world's alcohol and tobacco supply before reaching puberty.

I know my kids' misery is real to them...and that just makes it stinking cuter!

Seriously, though, sometimes it's not cute. Like when kids in my son's middle school class were telling him this one particular girl liked him and he approached her and it was all a joke. His humiliation hurt me probably as much as it hurt him. He is the perfect target for stuff like that and it breaks my heart because he would never dream of intentionally hurting someone else, so it makes him gullible because he forgets that other people are not like him. And then he feels doubly stupid afterward because he is aware that most people would pick up on this kind of stuff and he doesn't.

It's not the misery, per se, but the over-exaggerated response that I think gets the "aw...how cute!" response.

I'm tempted to say something scathing and insulting, because misery and cuteness don't mix. And anyone who thinks they do is a ___ type of person. But me being a non-parent guest in this forum, doing so won't win me any brownie points.

That said, I've had people try that "she likes you" kind of prank. Luckily, by middle school, I already knew that there's no way in hell a girl that even remotely attractive would be interested in me. So those pranks always failed, albeit for the wrong reasons. An "if it sounds too good to be true, it is" type of thing. Bullies, for some reason, never thought of asking a plain-looking girl to do that prank with me.

I appreciate your restraint. You wouldn't have lost brownie points with me, though. I respect your opinion.

My son has just graduated middle school. I think he will fall for that kind of thing for the rest of his life. Luckily, one time that it happened, the girl was actually mortified to find out that her friends did that and she actually ended up being a friend to him. I have worked very hard with him to make him understand that in life there are very few true bullies. There are just lots of people who do not have the courage to stand up to bullies, so they either join in, or fail to stop it. They do not have malicious intent, and really has nothing to do with him. It has to do with their fear and lack of courage. And sometimes not being able to identify what the right thing to do is. My son is very good at that.

But this is all beside your point. Life can be cruel. When I realized my kids were on the spectrum, the first thing that really made me lose sleep was knowing that they would be teased and bullied. I can't stand the way ignorant people act.

You know, I was looking back at an experience I had last month, and it made me actually understand your point about the cuteness thing. I got angry with your post earlier, and totally forgot about my own experience. Anyway, I was with an escort . You know, with her. At the end, I must have had the world's biggest smile on my face. When she saw it, she started laughing as a counter-reaction; she apologized afterwards.

Somehow,---it's almost a mystery how exactly---I totally understood where she was coming from. For her, making her clients smile was all in a day's work. But for me, seeing her was the highlight of June. So no wonder I reacted the way I did. However, she's used to older, richer, more socially skilled clients (some even married) for whom female company is no big deal---so therefore, they all react more calmly. She had no idea she was dealing with an aspie guy and all his struggles. So my disproportionately happy reaction triggered the laughter.

It's not the child's actual misery that seems cute to the adult, it's how they express themselves about it. You also don't just laugh you hug them, tell them it's ok and try to help them feel better. I don't know of any parent who wouldn't want to do anything they could to stop their childs pain about something, even if they thought whatever it was they were upset about was silly to begin with, and many times it is to an adult.

Also, I'm pretty sure that almost everyone has been in the situation as a child where their parents didn't understand how upset they were over something or just laughed it off or downplayed it. It's not something that usually scars you for life and it certainly doesn't make the parents "bullies". I don't know of anyone who has let it go so far as to make them want to make laughter illegal. That doesn't sound like a normal reaction to something like that at all. I've been laughed at by others a whole lot in my life and it's not laughter that is bad, it's a**holes who are bad.

When my kids were hurt about something, it hurt me as well and I did whatever I could to help them make it better. There were times when they got older where I had to teach them how to fix the situation themselves and lots of times I'd have to stand back and watch them struggle with it until they got it right because that is how you learn. They didn't get upset over that, they might have gotten frustrated but not upset with me. Also, there were times when I'd have to tell them that they were blowing something out of proportion and I wasn't going to participate in whatever it was, but other times I would participate in some kind of out of proportion thing because it was a different situation. While I know there are plenty of bad parents out there, I think most good parents are not insensitive to their kids feelings, even when they have to help the kid learn proportion and learn to handle things more maturely.

Learning proportion before your teenage years is important, because as I'm sure you have seen, it's hard to learn it when you are older because it's a knee jerk reaction to blow things out of it. I still feel like that emotionally sometimes even though logically I know I'm blowing something up. I have to make myself act appropriately until I'm able to calm down enough to actually feel the way I logically know I should be feeling. It takes self discipline, but I've learned to do it.

I think this is a very good analog to what I was trying to explain.

Lol, I guess the notion of cuteness-induced laughter is easier to understand when services of a certain nature are being rendered . Plus, I was well aware of the disconnect between myself and her other clients. A far cry from my childhood reaction to the coffee cup being broken.

I really have only ever cared if its a dish of mine that I like....but your parents just yelled at you and spanked because you cried over broken dishes? No trying to comfort their child or console them that its ok, and that such things happen?..that is harsh.