How Not To Raise An A**hole: Teach Your Kid To Read The Room
Sometimes, even the kindest kids need to be called out.
The goal in parenting is, generally, not to raise an a**hole. But, inevitably, your child will do something that makes you question the progress you’ve made in that arena. That doesn’t mean they’re a bad kid, or on an unshakeable path towards future a**hole-dom, it just means they might need a good call-out here and there.
One mom did just that, and shared the results in an Instagram Reel, captioned “how not to raise an a**hole.”
Nicki Marie had been out shoveling some heavy New England snow when her daughter made a request that really ground her gears.
“I'm going to tell you what's very wrong with that picture,” Nicki Marie said in the video. “I'm out this sweating, shoveling the snow, and you're asking me, could we go to the store for glue to make slime?”
Poor timing and slime-related... yeah, I’d be annoyed, too.
Nicki Marie took the opportunity to teach her daughter an important life lesson: you always have to read the room.
“You can't ask a struggling woman to go to the store and get glue,” she explained. “Wait till I'm calm, wait till I'm happy. Wait till there's a window of opportunity where I might say, ‘That sounds like a great idea!’ That was not the one.”
As we can see, failure to read the room can turn a normal request (‘Hey Mom, can we go to the store for glue?’) into one with a tinge of a**hole-ry (‘Hey Mom, love how tired and sweaty and cold you are from all that shoveling. Can we go get glue now?’).
The comments were in total support of Nicki Marie.
“‘You can’t ask a struggling woman to (fill in the blank).’ ESSENTIAL lessons here,” one user said.
“See THIS is what gentle parenting actually looks like 😂” said another.
“This is such a good life lesson,” another added. “We forget kids literally don’t have social skills until we teach them.” Yup, sometimes they really don’t!
