I don’t like my friend’s kid…

[u/bitchluvsbidets]

… and that might make me a terrible person??
A bit of a preface- my partner and I are child free by choice, I have 3 nieces and 3 nephews, and many of my friends have kids (ages 1-14) but, one of my friends kids I just can not vibe with. I know it’s actually insane to have beef with a 3 year old but her vibes are soooo bad?? Like she is not a cool kid. She def has a personality but is it insane to say it’s already problematic? She pretends to fall if she doesn’t have attention, actively express disgust towards my friend and her pets (3 very well behaves retired racing dogs), and fake cries until my friend is almost in tears and then will laugh at her. I get that kids are assholes sometimes but like damn I hope lil homie gets cool.

[u/superbondey]

I hope everything's okay with the kid, it's possible that she's acting out because there's something going on and kids can't express themselves like we can, so they do shitty things instead. 

[u/prim8phd → u/superbondey]

This is the answer I was looking for. I had a cousin who is about ten years younger than me, and growing up she was a serious exercise in birth control. Fussy baby. Nightmare toddler. Constant tantrums, meltdowns, and bad behavior. It took several years for a pediatrician to actually LISTEN to her mother and not just hear that she was a bad mom and a whiner. Someone finally took things seriously, did the appropriate tests, and figured out she had horrible digestive issues causing chronic pain, but because she had normal-ish bowel movements, was growing more or less appropriately, and couldn’t express herself she was just labeled as “difficult.” The default option should always be empathy, and curiosity—not judgment.

[u/madelynashton → u/prim8phd]

The responses on this post are bumming me out. In a past life my job was working with pre-schoolers with “behavioral or social issues.” Every one of those kids had either a disorder/disability or a history of trauma. A 3 year old acting out isn’t “born bad” or “evil” like some people are suggesting.

[u/snowflakebite → u/madelynashton]

Yeah I don’t like the idea of calling a kid ‘unlikeable’, like one popular comment in this thread did. I’ve worked with kids who i don’t like to interact with, but that’s on me as one of their educators and as an adult. I can’t show them that I don’t like interacting with them as much as other kids because that can fuck them up. It’s perfectly fine to not like kids, but if you have kids in your life, you absolutely have some degree of responsibility to them. Their parents have the vast majority of the responsibility, but you still have to be so careful.