She’s fucking possessed.
The new school year kicked off this week, which means lots of new students. Many of them have never been away from their moms for any length of time before, and that’s always a treat. Screaming, crying, wailing for mom, not getting that she’s not going to be around for the next 6 hours.
I don’t mind those kids at all.
They’re in a totally new environment, surrounded by kids and adults they’ve never seen before. I’m sure it’s quite a shock. They just need time to adjust, and it doesn’t take too terribly long for most of them. They make friends, get used to the teachers, and start having fun. No problem. I’m not talking about those kids.
No, the one I’m talking about isn’t even a student.
One of our teachers is on vacation right now, so the boss had a friend of hers come help out for a couple weeks. No problem with that. The school’s packed now and we definitely need the help. The problem is that she brought her daughter along. I deal with kids all day long, so what makes this one different?
She’s American.
She (and her mom) started this past Monday, and it took all of five minutes for me to detest her. And I’m not the only one to feel that way. She’s ill-behaved in the extreme, won’t listen to any adults (even her mom), does whatever she feels like, and if you tell her “no” she just pouts and whines.
I tell her “no” a lot.
Now, shitty behavior isn’t entirely the kid’s fault. Parents need to set boundaries and enforce them. If they don’t, everybody has to deal with one more brat in the world. Thankfully there are very few of these kids in Japan. (Or at least in my school.)
America’s full of ’em.
Since I don’t live in the US anymore, I really don’t care too much about the state of American parenting. But when a bratty kid turns up in my school and starts acting exactly the way we don’t allow kids to act, there are going to be battles. Especially when we’ve got a lot of new students who are going to be looking to the other kids for cues on how to act.
And I don’t want any of our students acting like this little hell-beast.
She can mouth off to her mom all she wants, but she’s not going to do it to me. So she gets dumped in the hallway, stuck in an empty classroom or just left in a corner to stew. To her mother’s credit, the mom backs me (and the boss) up with our discipline. She gets that her kid is just here temporarily, and while she might be a guest, she’s one that’s going to follow the rules.
And obey the teachers.
Having her in our school has reaffirmed all my beliefs about the state of parenting in America.
Namely, that nobody knows how to do it.
Yes, there may be exceptions to the rule, but they only serve to prove it. Permissive parents suck and they are doing their kids more harm than good. That’s not to say there aren’t parents like that in Japan. There may well be. But we don’t have any of their kids at my school.
Of course, with the law being laid down like it is, I might not even know if we did have any. ^.^