A couple times when visiting with my nephews, they’ll at some point internalize that our playtime is the new industry standard and act neglected when I’m either busy with something else or just not immediately doing the thing they want me to do. It’s an interesting iteration of the adage to “give someone an inch and they’ll take a mile”. You gift some little homies your precious attention and they decide that that’s now your job so the second you’re not there at your station, it’s like you didn’t show up for work.
That part is fine. I get that part. It’s the instinct of feeling something you like is being ripped away from you while you’re still in the honeymoon period with it. the part that’s annoying is the odious lie they’ll express it as. You’ve probably heard it before. It goes:
“You never play with me anymore”….
Or something like it. “You never ___ anymore” is the child version of “You’ve changed, man” that adults do after a few beers when confronted toward the maturing of their buddies. But with dumb stupid kids, the old “you never play with me anymore” requires attention. The right response is the reply in the old situation of a kid pouting over something wildly trivial and the adult answering/offering/threatening that “i’ll give you something to cry about” as a way of illustrating the difference between shiz that is and isn’t worth shedding face water over. Likewise, if you’ve been breaking your quickly weakening back and stressing your rusted out joints flipping, chasing, and raptor-murdering a bunch of rugrats and don’t spring to your feet when they ring the “come do all that stuff again right now no matter what else is going on” bell by saying “you never play with me anymore” then you have to show them what never playing with them looks like. I’d suggest verbally, instead of actually never playing with them and bringing it back up on their 21st birthday saying “See? THAT’S never playing with you. The stuff before was constant playing” but word it out for sure.
Not cuz your honor or the accuracy of the record is a big deal (they’re kids – they don’t even remember stuff that matters, let alone the stuff that doesn’t).
The old “hey! you’re busy for 2 hours? let me mope around and say how ‘yew never play with me anymoooore’ and maybe your guilt will shock you into giving me the attention I deserve” move needs correction for their character building. Nothing wrong with guilt trips, but they have to be accurate grievances or you’re just a douche. If you get played with all the friggin time and then your playmate gets busy, that doesn’t give you liberty to lie about the play-record. Justice must be demanded and there can be no justice without accuracy.
That was a way longer lead-in than I expected to what I thought was my main point and that is how this isn’t at all an acceptable thing to do for adults. Girls will do this nonsense to me, usually about texting them back or talking to them in general. Get busy for one week and it’s “you never text me anymore”, “you never reply to me anymore”, “you never talk to me anymore”.
I’m okay with inaccurate proclamations like “I love you” or “you’re the best I’ve ever had” or whatever, but “you never ____ anymore” is a falsehood that just makes me want to ban these insufferable harpies from my awesomeness forever. I hardly ever initiate contact with any human being, ever, but I always reply to it. So usually these complaints will come after a series of conversations and then when they are over – their dumb reptilian brains can only notice “there used to be something going on and now there isn’t. I must complain about it”, instead of looking at the context of the beginning and end of whatever those discussions were.
Don’t be a self-pitying child as an adult.
It’s barely understandable when children do it and you don’t have that excuse.
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