Is it just me, or am I being abused? Today, a friend asked me to take her son home after football practice as a favor. How hard can that be? Every time I asked him to put his shoes on he’d yell, “No!” then commence to run around the football field. It took fifteen minutes. When he finally got his shoes on, this little urchin walks up to me, slams down his backpack and then keeps walking. I say, “Excuse me? Are you going home without your backpack?” The seven-year-old smart ass says, “No, YOU’RE carrying it for me!”
At this, my son giggles and I see the transformation appear. He thinks all these bad guys are cool. He enjoys watching mommy squirm. So, I tell this little tyrant, “Nope, I didn’t hear you ask politely, so it’s staying right there.” And with that I walk off.
The boys screams and yells “Please!!! It’s SO heavy. Geez, my mom always carries it for me!”
Well, the ride home on the subway only gets worse. We enter the train station and the kid starts whining for candy at the vendor stand. I tell him, “No, your parents didn’t say you could have candy, so I’m not buying it for you. You can have crackers or something healthy.”
The kid starts screaming and picking up candy. I point to the crackers again. “I don’t like those!” he wails.
I stick to my guns. On the train platform with the two beside me, I tell him, “You know why I didn’t buy you candy right? Besides the fact that you clearly don’t need sugar, you were very rude to me today and I won’t reward that.”
He doesn’t say sorry, but spits out, “Well FINE. I won’t do that again.”
I guess that was somewhat of a victory, but I’m absolutely exhausted by all my son’s friends. My part-time nanny is telling me to stop all playdates or my son will become “like them.” It’s just sad. Just about every kid my son likes at school is a sass mouth. (Of course they don’t act up at all in school.) Trying to reach out to other kids to help make new friends isn’t helping so much. I invited one other boy from school over and when I introduced him to my nanny he had the audacity to tell her, in a snobby voice, “You are no one.”
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