How people view children
The following post is extrememly disjointed and disconnected because there is a subject of an entire post within the post. However, because I feel that it would be an unnecessary waste of time to post up both rants separately, and to keep in flow with the strange digression pattern that I have in this blog, I have left it the way it is. If because of this, you wish to disregard the opinions that I put forth in this blog, well I wish you well and good luck.
This past Sunday, my little brother, being bored and being unable to find other children to play with, decided that it would be fun to throw rocks to see how far he could throw them.
But to fully describe the situation, we need to know the following things: first of all, there was a dog present while he was throwing the rocks and by his own admission, he said that he was looking at the dog. Second, there were lots of cars around.
The main question? What is the first thing that an adult would assume when they see a six-year old standing in a parking lot throwing r0cks while there is a dog nearby. It may not be a completely illogical assumption to make that the child is throwing the rocks at the cars or at the dog.
The question that I would like to put forth in this rant, however, is if that is the correct assumption to be immediately making. Because in this situation, the above stated assumption is exactly what a tenant of the apartment building next door to the church made when she came storming out of the apartment and into the church demanding to see where the "little Chinese kid" had gone.
There were some major issues that I had with this lady, viewing the whole situation in hindsight and seeing what there is to learn from this situation. First of all, I sort of resented the fact that she called him Chinese, considering that we are Korean. Apparently, the world still has not figured out that there are more Oriental (East Asian if you like that term better) people out there than just Chinese people. The second problem I had with this lady was that she immediately assumed that I was lying, told me so, and expected me to just take it without reacting to it negatively. Perhaps I should elaborate on this point a little further.
When the lady came into the church, the first adult that she saw was me standing with two other high school kids in the youth group. When she asked us if we had seen a little kid come running in, I responded that I had seen two little kids running past (considering that our church has at least 12 little children in it, it's hard to say no.) When I asked her to describe the particular child that she was looking for, she described my little brother's clothes quite well. So I went off to look for my little brother, brought him back, and told him to apologize to the lady. He did so, but then she continued on by lecturing at him and at me, which was definately not her perogative. She can be excused by the fact that she was upset because she believed that damage had been done to her vehicle, but then she went on to start making accusations about the care that my parents gave to my brother by demanding to know what a six year old child was doing in a parking lot all by himself.
This was going way over the line, and so when she asked for our parents' names and phone number I refused and told her, in not so many words, to get the hell out. By this time, I had gotten way too angry to think rationally. Fortunately for the whole situation, an adult happened to pass by, and she said she refused to talk to me and wanted to talk to the other adult instead. This was also where she made the acccusations about my lying, and when someone says that I did something I did not do, it makes me see red.
She went out with the adult to point to the damage that had been done to the vehicles (it turns out there were none... go figure) and I decided that the Christian thing to do was to go out and apologize, because I realized that she did have a legitimate claim to be angry because she thought her car was damaged. It was slightly silly of her to come storming in when nothing had happened to the car, but again, that's a slight digression as well from the main point.
What did I learn from this situation? Although, I've stopped deciding to just apologize and let other people walk all over me, I have also realized that there is no point in getting upset at what a person says, no matter what it is that they are saying. The only thing that comes of that is your "discussion" elevates into a shouting match and very little positive comes of it. The best thing to do is to ask yourself why this person is acting this way, come at it from their point of view, because obviously you already know your own point of view, and do your best to understand what it is that they want. If you really want to bring them up to task about the other accusations they are making, do so in the most pleasent way you can, but the best thing to do is probably to just leave it alone and come back to the main topic at hand, you'll only get them more angry.
That's all just background info: the main point of this blog is how people view and deal with children. Coming back to the list of issues, the third issue that I had with this lady was her refusal to try and hear his side of the story. It is as if the child's view of the whole thing is unimportant, or at the most irrelevant, because what the adult sees is somehow more sophisticated. Why is this? Are children not people too? Do we not comment on how children seem to be so much more wise than adults at times? At how children seem to be able to cut to the core of complicated situations much faster than adults? In my view, anyone that says that, and yet refuses to acknowledge a child's point of view in every situation is being hypocritical. If they seem to be wise in some situations, why not listen to what they have to say of all situations? Sure you can sift through it to identify solutions that have already been tried and haven't really worked, but that doesn't preclude you from the fact that you should still listen to what they have to say.
Little kids are a lot smarter than most people give them credit for: if we only took the time to listen to what they have to say instead of assuming things about a situation based on how children have been known to behave, I think that it would better prepare children for the world and also destroy this view that young people have that they can't do anything until they grow up into an adult.
