There is a gaggle of children and parents out on the shared terrace that my living room is just off of. It’s a lot of kid’s playing noise (not annoying) and squeeing parent noise (annoying). But fine, that’s the price of being urban.

One little girl gets her toy stolen and gets hit by another little girl. She gets upset and says “you’re mean! I don’t wanna be your friend anymore”. (A perfectly rational reaction, in my opinion. She didn’t hit back. She used her words.) The girl then gets dragged off by her mother and the mother starts telling her that even though it was wrong for the other girl to take her toy and hit her, it wasn’t okay for her to call her mean and not want to be her friend.

What? Why the fuckity fuck is it not okay, “not nice” for her to tell the other kid she didn’t want anything more to do with her after she acted like a toy-thieving bully?

This is one of those thousands of little moments where, from the time we are tiny, we are told that it is more important to be “nice” than it is to be safe.

And yeah, it’s just a playground kerfluffle. But the kid did exactly what we want kids to do if a grown-up touches them in a not-nice way. What kind of mixed fucking message is it when we force them to play with someone who has hurt them?

So kid, upon hearing her mother tell her that she needed to go apologize to the kid who hit her because she said some “not very nice things” starts screaming and making gagging noises “mommy I wanna go home, mommy I don’t feel well, mommy please”.

Oh for fucks sake. Ugh. The rage. It burns.