guardianofscrewingup:

angryteenagebear:

shinjutori:

crab-cakes:

kexx:

officer1bdi:

hannasnonsense:

Telling someone they’re not good enough is not okay

Telling someone they’re not good enough is not okay

I don’t care if you’re joking. I don’t care if you think ‘It will push them to work harder.’ Because it isn’t a joke, and it will not always make someone want to work harder to prove you wrong.

Sometimes they accept it as a fact, then they live with a mindset of “Why try when I’m just going to fail?”

It’s not okay.

GPOY

I remember acing my AP European History test and being ecstatic about it until I told my father and he shrugged it off like it was nothing. Then I felt terrible for feeling so proud of myself.

This sort of shit fucks people up man. Perfectionism is not something that can be obtained and it is a horrible, negative schema to get stuck in. No matter how well I did it was never good enough for my mom. “Go get involved! (when I was younger)” “Well now that you’re involved now I have to drive you places…” “Man Tae Kwon Do is getting pretty expensive” “Why would you quit? You quit everything! You’re a quitter.” “Omg why’d you get a B?” “Oh you got all As…eh.” Currently going through therapy to get over this mentality. 

“Everyone else can do this, why can’t you?” “You’re just being lazy, you need to work harder.” “No, don’t give me excuses. You failed because you didn’t care enough.” “You let yourself fail. You should have seen your partner’s behavior and taken the work load all onto yourself. You let that happen and you let yourself fail.” “College is so important and you have to go” ( “I mean, sometimes some people aren’t cut out to go to college.” ) “I know you’re capable of more than a C, so why aren’t you doing better.” “You’re not trying hard enough to get a job. People probably haven’t called you back because your hair is a strange color” (fyi, it was a sandy blonde). “Why can’t you just do things my way for once.”

There’s more where that came from, but I think you get the point. The hilarious part is that my mom always asks “You should come talk to me if you have any problems, okay honey?” Yeah, okay. That’s exactly what I’m going to do after 20 some odd years of that.

One of my mom’s favorite phrases was/is “You never tell me anything!”

Accompanying that are the phrases:

“You all talk shit about me behind my back!”

“You’re so lazy. You need to get out more.”

“Where are you going I had plans for today!”

And my personal favorite:

“You are intelligent for God’s sake ACT LIKE IT!”

every time I being home a report card my mom goes “it’s ok but I bet you could’ve gotten straight As if you had actually tried”

and every time I do a chore, she just gets mad at me for not having done 7 other chores that she has never even mentioned.

I can literally never tell if she’s going to react to something I’ve done with happiness or with anger and it’s left me with this paranoia that everyone is mad at me and I am going to fail at everything and no one wants me around because I’m a gross failure.

Sometimes I wonder why some people even become parents because it seems like they want kids more to live vicariously through their accomplishments and have a toadie to kick aroumd for their failures so they can feel better about themselves and I just wonder why it never occurs to them that maybe that means they shouldn’t be a parent.

If you feel the need to treat your kid that way, where you diminish every accomplishment they make to feel better about yourself or whatever stupid reason you do it, maybe that’s a sign you need to get a fucking life. Because living through your kid’s life and dicking with your kid’s self esteem is a shitty hobby.

You know what’s a good hobby? Knitting. Knit all the shit. Or decoupage. Or fucking curling I don’t know. Instead of treating your kid’s self esteem like a yoyo learn to ACTUALLY yoyo AND become a yoyo master. Collect stamps. Drooling over this month’s copy of Philatelist Monthly is still a better way to get your kicks then systematically dismantling the self esteem of your twelve year old child.