I wonder how common this dynamic is now.
It was fascinating to hear my 7 year old daughter grasp for words to make me angry: ‘when you and mom divorce, I’m going with mom.’ I just raised an eyebrow and ignored. Boy’s will just throw things.
Wow! Adult, professional writers could work for a long time to produce such multiple brutal takedowns in so few words.
I pray for the sake of all of us that your daughter uses her powers for good.
The second worst thing you can do is to also get angry or punish her, which will only make her feel justified and not question herself.
The worst would be giving her what she wanted. That's not the lesson you want to teach at all.
So basically follow this father's lead and do nothing. Maybe talk about how it makes you feel once things calmed down.
These types of outbursts also happen in the very elderly as they near death or have dementia, and are more likely to happen when people are very hungry or uncomfortable. Just knowing that is normal helps frame a response.
Our job as parents could therefore be described as helping create an environment where it is easy to do good and hard to do bad. I.e. get enough sleep with strict bed-times when kids naturally would sleep 10-12 hours each day, good nutrition with strict ‘if you don’t eat veggies, there is no dessert’, good activity levels with strict ‘you have to be physically active at least as long as you want to be mentally active/passive on an entertainment device’ (and for some religious households like ours, intentional daily and vocal ‘prays/acts of thanksgiving’ to help frame the mind towards gratitude for mental well being ~i.e. our children in this context have shared with the family at least one thing they are thankful for each day since they could vocalize.)
The solution is probably some variation of "pay teachers more."
Never mind that the younger teachers were almost always leaps and bounds more engaging, while the older teachers were far less engaging. Everyone liked the younger teachers more than the older teachers - everyone except the teachers' union, that is (this is, naturally, why I came out of high school believing labor unions to be outright detrimental to worker welfare, and why I still tend to be skeptical of them).
Naturally, in an environment where you're doing everything you can to not get laid off, you're going to end up being a lot more risk-averse (lest that layoff spontaneously turns into outright at-fault termination).
It's a bit rich to accuse me of ageism when the exact problem I'm pointing out - of younger teachers getting the short end of the stick despite their skill - is literally ageism manifest.
I would say believing girls/women is more common now.
Note that I don't think this was something about girls lying, I think everyone lied equally at that age or maybe even boys lied more. But the way school administrators deal with these issues is insane and certainly seems to damage kids far more than whatever they fear will happen if kids are allowed to have a little freedom. I can say with high certainty that the number of times I was sent to the principal's office as a kid for things I didn't do was the primary cause of my constant trouble making behavior for most of elementary and middle school
I definitely was no saint at school. Not sure many people can say they were.
> I don't think this was something about girls lying
Me either, but I do feel when something happens between a male and female, unless there is enough witnesses, side is always taken with the girl it seems, unless the witness is friends with the boy, then they aren't deemed reliable.
Another time at school I was playing basket ball with a couple of friends. There was an Indian girl walking by and the ball almost hit her, I pointed at her and said watch out and the ball just missed her, I laughed at the fact she just narrowly escaped being hit with the basket ball, but she thought I was laughing at her nose piecing for some reason. (I don't understand where this confusion came from, I couldn't even see she had a nose piecing until later when I was standing next to her) but again I was forced to apologize for laughing at her culture or something like that.
That was upsetting. I don't remember being angry or yelling (but I could be wrong?). But I was sad and probably non-communicative with her for the rest of the class time.
The teacher took me out of the classroom and scolded me for behaving the way that I was and that I have to talk to her and that I was bad. I kinda just took it with a blank face. I didn't tell the teacher what the girl said, probably because I didn't really understand why I was upset.
Every system is perfectly designed to produce the result that it produces. So the question we might want to ask our selves is, "what is the system producing"?