Last night I shared a very innocent (in my opinion!) photo of Noah on Facebook. Someone left a really hurtful comment that I feel I need to address.
Let me explain the photo more–
I brought the boys to Hobby Lobby to pick up some supplies for Connor’s 100th Day of School activity.
They were feeling extra silly & I was extra tired. Instead of asking them to use “walking feet, please” or “inside voices” like I always do, I let them skip ahead of me a bit and laugh with each other.
We went down the sticker aisle and while I was looking for “monster stickers” the boys sat on the floor and started playing & being silly with each other. Again, something I typically wouldn’t allow but they weren’t being rude or in anyone’s way so I let them sit on the floor and laugh with each other for a couple minutes. Their laughter was super cute (and super distracting! I forgot what I was even looking for 🙂 ) so I pulled out my phone to snap a few photos of their silly moment together.
We finished our shopping and came home for dinner. After making the boys their plates I sat down on the sofa and flipped through the photos of our shopping trip. I got to the “sticker aisle sillies” and smiled when I saw how cute the boys were together.
I was stopped dead in my tracks and totally shocked, though, when I saw a photo that looked like Noah was flipping Connor the bird!
I absolutely know my son has no clue what that even means. I absolutely know he has never seen that before. And I absolutely know that he was NOT even attempting to flip Connor off. But I still thought it was kind of funny.
So, naturally I did what I always do…posted it to my social media accounts.
Fast forward a couple hours to when I read a comment on that photo suggesting that I thought it was cute & allowed Noah to actually flip off Connor. The comment also suggested that I was not teaching my boys respect.
WHAT?!? You must be joking.
I shouldn’t let the comment bother me as much as it did, I know. But I felt really hurt by it. It’s a photo of a toddler, caught at just the right (er, wrong?) time as he is telling his brother to “stop”. The photo was shared among adults as a “haha- look what my kid did but didn’t really do” silly photo. It was SILLY. It did not deserve the judgement and assumption that I allow my kids to be disrespectful.
Abe and I talked for a bit and we were both just so shocked by the response. We agreed that almost more than anything, we work really hard to raise respectful kids. It’s very important to us that are boys are respectful with adults and kind to their peers. Not to toot our own horn, but I have been told several times how nice it is to see us teach our kids to look people in the eye when they are talking to them & that our boys always say “please” & “thank you”. We have had total strangers compliment us on how polite they are in restaurants or stores. Are they perfect? Of course not. They are 2 & 5!! But I will not believe for one second that they are disrespectful kids.
Can we just please focus on treating people with kindness? Let’s lift each other up and treat people with the respect they deserve. Raising children is hard work. Lets support one another when things are hard & laugh with each other when our kids are silly!
Remember growing up when your mom would say “If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all”?
Well….
