If you are the parent of a King-sized preschooler who likes to punch smaller kids for no reason and you are sitting on a park bench watching the goings on and being generally lazy, I'm not very happy with you right now.
Joshua met his first bully today. Joshua was running around playing with a four year old who was about the same size as him, we'll call this kid X. Then Bully comes over and starts running around too. Mostly these kids are just running in aimless circles and laughing their heads off. Bully looks to be 6 or 7 years old, but it's school hours and school is still in session here, so I'll give benefit of the doubt that this little bruiser is also a preschooler. In all honesty, I don't think he meant to be mean...He would shout "I'm Spiderman!" and run up and just start punching Joshua or X, whomever was closer to him. Things quickly evolved to Joshua and X running AWAY from Bully because they didn't like the way he played. Myself and the other parent tried to tell him to stop, when that didn't work, we told Joshua and X to just nicely say "Please don't play like that." or "Please don't hit me." Joshua said, "Dat not NICE!" to him a few times. Finally Joshua had tears in his eyes and said "Please Pick me up, Mommy..." Bully tried to stop him from walking to me. I had about enough. We took X and Joshua to a different playset(there are 4 at this playground) to play, but after a few minutes of casting dubious glances in the direction of Bully, they both just wanted to go home.
Where was Mom during all this? Mom was sitting on a park bench, watching everything and doing, you guessed it, nothing. Watched the whole thing, heard us disciplining Bully, did nothing. Said nothing when I made a snide comment to her as we were leaving.
Now, normally, I would say to him if there was a fight, "He hit you? Well, you have two options. A, you could tell him you'll pray for him and walk away or B, hit him back, he started it. Defend yourself, boy!" But, really, he's two years old. He's just starting to understand the we-dont-hit-the-baby-no-matter-what rule. To tell him to hit back would have been counter-productive at this stage.
Kids fight, kids hit, and boys will be boys. I get all of that, but this is MY baby we're talking about! MY little boy who was punched, hard, several times. MY little angel who went to bed still confused about "little boy hit me arm" and called his daddy in Seattle and his grampa in Ohio to tell them. Seems like a man-moment to me... LOL.
The part that really bugged me was that mom just didn't seem like she cared. She said NOTHING during all of this happening. If my kid was randomly hitting someone half, yes HALF, his size, I would haul his happy butt back home and punish him. I would NOT continue to allow him to play and have fun. I don't care if boys fight, you don't teach yours to be the one to start the fight. No matter the situation. And I feel really badly for the boy because obviously nobody is teaching him these things. He was clearly confused as to why the other boys didn't want to play any longer. I told him, "If you are going to keep punching kids, they're not going to want to play with you." I said this after having told him several times to ease up and settle down, we don't hit etc etc.... He seemed dejected and sad. Mom clearly needs to step up or this kid is going to have problems later on. And that bother me. A lot.
At any rate, my angel-boy is fine, just had his first playground friend that played too mean for him. And it bothers me. But it should be bothering Bully's mom more.
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