There seems to be a serious lack of understanding of children and childhood among the posters in this thread. Maybe try reading a book or two about child development before crabbing about how awful they are. Infants scream because they lack any other mode of communication. Toddlers throw tantrums because they are testing boundaries and can be easily overstimulated. Kindegarteners willfully disobey because they are exploring independence. And so on.... Kids are not evil, nor angels, they're just young people still learning how to think, emote, and cope with stress.
I don't think "serious lack of understanding" is the problem here - in fact, if I'm being mean-spirited, I'll mean-spiritedly suggest that the above is frankly rather patronising. People generally understand that children don't wilfully, consciously set out to irritate simply because they're eeevil or for the hell of it: that understanding does not stop them occasionally being irritating or completely dispel our irritation when they do behave this way.
(Rough, flippant off-the-top-of-my-head analogy: wasps. Really, truly, deeply, I understand that wasps aren't here on the planet simply to piss me off. I understand they're motivated by stuff that's not, in fact, all about me, and dentist-drill whininess around my head makes perfect sense in terms of waspy psychology. Knowing all this, they're still frequently an irritant.)
No. It's how we manage that inevitable irritation that appears to be the issue. Rather than giving the tantrummy child in question a good kicking - or, indeed, smiling beatifically and burying our noses in child development textbooks (did plenty of that when I studied Child Psych, ta) - most of us discharge that irritation by grumbling about brats and/or their crappo parents, or through black humour. I don't think that necessarily maps onto "hate" at all; in fact, I see it as a healthy coping mechanism. |
