Everyone loves the Reasons my Son is Crying tumblr.
Everyone, except me.
I am not usually such a curmudgeon about such things. I am the first to admit that kids, especially kids around 2-years-old (like the one in the tumblr seems to be), are hilarious, illogical, pains in the arse.
My favourite episode of Isaac’s hilariously irrational wailing came when he broke a biscuit in half, had a grand meltdown about the fact that it could not be put back together, then the second he got over that, started up again because his tears and snot had so saturated the damn thing it was disintegrating. Ridiculous.
But people, being two is hard. Kids are just developing a sense of the world around them. It is huge, both in scope and in scale, and they don’t understand the rules of how anything works. The touchstones they arbitrarily choose to rely on for security end up being not so reliable. They also doesn’t understand their own emotions, or why they are suddenly full of rage or fear (and so being afraid of their own crazy brains, without the benefit of much self-awareness), compounding the issue.
And instead of helping his kid navigate two-years-old, this dad is stopping to take a picture, so he can put it up for people to laugh at. And that just doesn’t sit right with me.
Part of this comes with our current experiences with Isaac: the most notable parts of his day, the times he wants to tell us about, are the times he was sad.
It’s not that he’s sad particularly often – it’s actually pretty rare. So rare, in fact, that he will manufacture sadness, just so he has something to talk about. Example: he is perfectly fine, but will suddenly throw himself on the floor, wail for a few minutes, then get up again – totally fine – and proudly declare ‘I was sad on the floor, mummy!’
He re-enacts sad events that happened (the time he fell on his face and cut his lip), and picks up on all the frowning or crying characters in his picture books.
It’s pretty obvious that ‘Sad’ is just the emotion he’s most confident in identifying, so he wants to share his understanding. Sortof like when he figured out colours, and everything was ‘Blue!’ (his first colour) for a while.
Still, just like we made an effort to point out all the not-blue things to expand Isaac’s colour repetoire, we’re now talking more about the other emotions. So while it’s ok to be sad, and natural to cry sometimes, it’s also good to be happy, surprised, excited, nervous, etc.
Because how sad is it, to think about being sad all the time? To have all the attention paid to your most troublesome and traumatic moments?
I know, sometimes there are unintentionally hilarious side effects of kids’ experiences figuring out the world, but just like I wouldn’t want someone to focus on my worst moments, when I’m out of my element and flailing, I don’t think it’s particularly funny, or kind, to do that to someone else. No matter how old or young they may be.
Cheeseballs making cheese faces
You are not alone. The reasons for tears are often ridiculous and after a day full of them it does help to be able to laugh about it rather than pull my hair out in frustration, but I do not like seeing kids crying. So I can giggle sbout the reasons for the tears; they are absurd and it is HARD to be little and have such big and overwhelming emotions, but I’d like to pass on the pictures. And when Jack learned his colours everything was blue for a while too.
I think whether or not this is sad / bad parenting depends on whether, as you say, “instead of helping his kid navigate two-years-old, this dad is stopping to take a picture” – these photos have all been posted recently, but is it true that the dad captures every crying instance? There are only 34 (at my count) photos on the site. From I’m sure I could find 30 photos of my son where he’s looking unhappy.
Not the funniest thing I’ve ever seen, but I don’t see it as a tragedy. In my opinion, the funny parts of the blog are the captions.