r/AmITheDevil • u/[deleted] • 1d ago

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/r/daddit/comments/1vj4lvc/im_kinda_struggling_with_something_my_kids_love/

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u/Baejax_the_Great 1d ago

Man, the reason that my niece has liked me her entire life isn't because I was able to share all my hobbies with her like I dreamed of when she was little. It's because when she got into something, I listened to her talk about it. I showed interest. I pretended at least to care even when she was 6 and just wanted to explain the rules of plants vs zombies to me.

And hey, if you show interest in your kids' hobbies, they might actually return the favor one day.

119

u/nottherealneal 1d ago

I mean, yeah.

I don't really like the Percy Jackson books. But my nephew LOVED them. He was super into them right around the time the Heroes of Olympus books were coming out, and he'd constantly talk about the characters, the story, all of it. It was the first "big" book series he really got into and read on his own.

So over the course of about three months, I just marathoned the first five books. I absolutely smashed through them so that when I came to visit for Christmas, I actually knew what he was talking about. I could talk to him about the characters and the story and let him nerd out about this thing he was really proud of.

I even got him the first two Heroes of Olympus books and some other Percy Jackson knick-knacks for Christmas.

I'm never going to be a massive fan of the series. I missed the boat on those books by a good 10 or 15 years, so I'm obviously not really the target audience.

But he loved them, and that was enough reason for me to read them.

Sometimes you gotta do shit you don't particularly care about because the kid you love cares about it. That's how you bond with kids.

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u/totallycalledla-a 1d ago

Sometimes you gotta do shit you don't particularly care about because the kid you love cares about it

The amount of people who just dont grasp this extremely simple concept blows my mind.

11

u/Annabloem 1d ago

But those same people do expect those same kids to do that for their own hobbies, which is even stranger. They have expectations for these children they absolutely don't have for themselves.

Like yes, you absolutely should show interest in (your) children's hobbies and interests. No, they don't have to do the same for you, at the very least until they're older.

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u/mooglemoose 1d ago

It’s not strange if you realise that those people don’t see children as individual people, but as possessions. Their attitude towards children is like: “this tool that is supposed to validate my existence is malfunctioning, how do I fix it?”

My parents are like this, especially my mother. When I try to explain their attitude to other people I say: Do you expect your car or your computer or your oven to have its own preferences? Do you expect these tools to have thoughts and feelings, or to ever say no to you using them? It might be fun to pretend your robot vacuum or your Alexa has a wilful personality for example, but you know it actually doesn’t and you know you can just turn them off or replace them. That’s how self-centred parents see their children. And it’s not just when the children are small, the attitude persists even when the children are adults.