Sadly, some parents are not the most kind-hearted and don't realize how powerful their words are. They also don't realize how much their children are affected by their words...
Parents Who Blame The Children For Their Own Personal Problems…
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1) “I had a patient whose father kept on asking the doctor how much weight his son needed to lose in the middle of a crowded waiting room. The doctor tried to take him to the back but made the mistake of saying, ‘He’s following his curve’. The father flipped out and said, ‘I know he’s a little fatty, I coach soccer and I’m absolutely disgusted by him when I see the other kids out there twenty to thirty pounds lighter than him.’ He said this in a crowded waiting room, in front of his eleven-year-old son. The doctor finally gets him to the back, the waiting room is deathly silent. I take the son to finish his physical and another patient’s mother approached him and said, ‘I know it hurts right now, I know you feel so terrible, but you don’t deserve to be treated like that, no one does. And I want you to realize that one day very soon, you are going to realize that you are not the problem. And I hope when that day happens, his words stop hurting you. Because I know he’s your dad and you’re supposed to listen to him, but sweetie, adults can be very very wrong sometimes.'”–
2) “Once during the holiday season, I was stuck in a very long line at Costco. In front of me were a man and his 5-6-year-old son. His son was jumping around trying to get his father’s attention, but the dad was having none of it. Finally, the little boy tugs on his dad’s jacket and says, ‘Daddy can we…’ and his dad turns sideways, crouches down and sharply, cruelly and somewhat quietly snarls, ‘Shut the heck up, you little brat’. I gasped audibly, and the guy sideways glares at me, stands up and puts his back toward me. The little boy practically melted into the cement floor. It was so sad. I stood there for a bit, thinking of what to do. When the queue was down to the person before the sad boy and his father I found my voice. I walked to the end of my cart and bent down to the boy and told him that he was a good boy and that I loved his shirt (Cars 2 shirt). I told him how much my children love those movies. Then I stood up next to the dad and he would not look at me. I whispered under my breath that he was a coward and that I hoped that the coming year would give him the clarity to see life and himself through his little boy’s eyes. He did seem to soften a little after that, talked to his son, held his hand.”–
3) “Less than a week after my father-in-law died of cancer, my wife was, understandably, having a very hard time coping. She and her dad were really close. Her mother, however, decided for no particular reason to come into the room, sit down, and say, ‘You know, your father wouldn’t have died if you would have moved back in with us like I’d asked you to. It’s your fault he died, and I’m glad he can’t see you because he’d be extremely disappointed in you.'”–
4) “I once heard a mom say to her child: ‘If you don’t knock it off right now, this man is going to call the police and they’re going to come take you away! Is that what you want? Do you want to go to jail? You want to be like your daddy?!’ The kid was about 6 years old…”–
5) “My dad has called me all sorts of colorful names and was never kind to me, but at one point he told me the reason he left when I was younger was because he could tell I was going to be ugly, a loser, and a disappointment to him, and he didn’t want the shame of telling people I was his child. I was 14 when he said this. Self-esteem? Non-existent.”–
6) “Eh my father has said a ton of stuff to me. Daily death threats over minuscule stuff (I’ll blow the brains out of your head if you don’t shut the heck up) starting from when I was 10. I can’t remember every little thing as I have a bad memory and maybe I’ve repressed a lot of it. He is mentally deranged and lives in his own deluded reality. My entire childhood consisted of mental, verbal, and emotional abuse ranging from anything over everything. Luckily, for now, he’s in prison, and assuming all goes well, I will never see him again. So help me if I do, I will screw his world up in a quick minute.”–
7) “‘Your sister was a disappointment, you are too. Now that she is gone, I can take over and fix you.’ My sister just died in an accident two days before my mum said this, have not talked to her in years now.”–
8) “My mom wanted my brother to go to a new school, but my brother didn’t want to leave his friends behind. So my mother told him that his friends had come to her and told them how much they hated my brother and how he was a terrible friend and they were happy that he wouldn’t be going to school with them anymore. Of course, my brother was young and had anger problems. He, unfortunately, believed her, cut off all ties with those friends (although they patched things up after a couple years). But she’s a horrid woman.”–
9) “I was born with Hydrocephalus, which required a great deal of neurosurgery in the first decade of my life which was very expensive. One day while my mother was washing up and I was drying she said the following. Her: ‘You know, if it wasn’t for you, I could be living in a nicer house with a better car and nice jewelry and I could go traveling… You really screwed up my life you know? And now because of you, not only my life is falling apart but my marriage too.’ Me: ‘What are you trying to say?’ Her: ‘I wish you were never born…’ I dropped everything and ran to the park and sat on the swing for just over two days before someone who lived near the park grew concerned and took me home. Now, I’m a pre-service teacher about to start my intern. I’m sure that by the time that is over, let alone my career in teaching, that I will have heard a great deal of very bad things from parents…”–
10) “My mum yelled at my brother and blamed him for her miscarriage. Really hurt hearing her say that.”
Brutal Opinions Are Not Necessary!
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11) “In an argument with mother; I lived with a severe phobia that kept me locked in the house and was extremely depressed with a past history of suicide attempts. My mother was, being the nasty human that she is, finally got me to a turning point where I yelled, ‘I might as well kill myself!’ Her response immediately was, ‘If you don’t do it, I will!’ I spent an entire year pretty much curled up into a ball. How I’m able to sit here and type this, I have no clue. I do have to say, though, it gets better. Anyone in my shoes, please seek help. It’s worth it. Even if you have to take pills, anything is better than that abuse.”–
12) “My mom is adopted and her siblings are not. Her grandmother had a vast collection of beautiful jewelry with a long family history dating back to the 1700s. She once told my mother, ‘You like these pretty jewels? I’m going to leave them to my granddaughters. My real granddaughters.’ My mom was 7. True to her word, my mom’s sisters and female cousins inherited the vast collection of jewelry. It doesn’t matter that some of it was rather valuable, much of it had been passed down through the women in the family for generations and had a ton of sentimental value. My mom got nothing, the rest of the surviving family also got thousands of dollars, each. Happy ending: The girls each gave her one of the necklaces, broaches, rings, or bracelets. They offered her some of the money, she refused to take it. Her cousin, with whom she was always close, unfortunately, passed away from cancer a few years back. She left my mom the exact amount that their grandmother had given each family member, with a note: ‘You are and always have been a cherished part of this family.'”–
13) “I was walking in front a woman and her approximately twelve-year-old daughter and I heard the girl comment on how pretty she thought my dress was. This is what her mother said: ‘That’s what streetwalkers wear. Is that what you want to be when you grow up? A loose, short-haired girl like her? Are you gonna get pregnant next year? Are you gonna drop out of school and start getting into illegal activities? Start hooking up with strangers? Cause that’s what dresses like that do. Sometimes I don’t know what I did, to deserve a filthy daughter like you.’ I should mention that the dress I was wearing hit just above the knees and wasn’t even tight or revealing (not that it would’ve mattered anyway). Her mom was just a horrid woman.”–
14) “I was 18 or 19, and she was slapping me around one day, I’m yelling, ‘I am now an adult, this is assault! I’m going to call the police and you will finally go to jail.’ And my mom, the psycho is like (paraphrased a bit) ‘Go on, call the police, but then I will get some acid and a knife and mess you up so bad that it will be worth the jail time to see you messed up beyond recognition.’ So, then I hightailed it out of there quick smart!”–
15) “My parents were 17 when they had me and everyone in the family wanted them to end the pregnancy. Instead, they got married and both sides of the family called me the mistake, the reason my dad did not do more and a lot of other things that still haunt me today at 37. Sometimes when I was a kid I would wish they had because I am sure it would have hurt less than the lifetime of ridicule I got from family members.”
Things You Should Never Bring Up In Front Of Children!
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16) “When I was 19 I was staying at my ex’s house one night when all of a sudden I was abruptly woken up from a loud crash. I went downstairs to investigate, her father had stumbled in and knocked over a bookshelf. I tried to help him to his feet but he refused acting proud and calling me worthless. We started to argue and at this point, his daughter (my ex) came down. She tried calming the situation down and got in between us. As she stepped in between us her father said the most disturbing thing I’ve ever heard. ‘You’re such a disgrace and I wish I didn’t let your mother have you because you serve no purpose in life.’ Then I attempted to chime in but he cut me off, ‘You! Who do you think you are, I made her scream louder than you when she was younger!’ At this point my ex was balling her eyes out, I put the pieces together and punched her dad to the ground. Before I knew it I was in the back of a cop car with bloody knuckles. After this incident, she broke up with me because I put her father in the hospital.”–
17) “‘You are the reason why I am dying.’ I was about 9 and my mom was mad I didn’t clean my room like she asked me to. She had also been going in and out of hospitals that year due to kidney problems, so I believed her…”–
18) “Two answers: ‘Belt, rod, or pipe?’ My dad, on many occasion growing up. He was asking me which implement I preferred to be beaten with. Either that or nothing, as in my father would turn to complete, stony silence when I showed him fresh scars I had received, courtesy of my older brother, who was later declared insane. My brother had his own implements of torture – each much slower and therefore worse, a soldering iron, lit smokes, or blade, even a thumbscrew for a time – the sensation of each is different, and they leave different marks, but it’s all the same in a way. Pain without end, no hope that one can withstand it, yet an agonizing hope for it to end regardless. So I often wondered – What’s worse from a parent – commission of harm or omission of protection? From my own experience, I honestly don’t know. Ask me at a different time, I’ll give a different answer. The bruises from my father’s batterings all healed; I still bear scars from my brother’s torture. It’s my father’s actions and inaction that lasts. Many years later, driving home after seeing Goodwill Hunting with my wife, I had to pull over and bawl like a baby as she held me in her arms. Good woman, my wife. Time doesn’t heal all wounds, but it heals most and lessens others if you only let it.”–
19) “Not to me, but my stepmom told the people I was living with that they were glad I got in a car accident that nearly killed their daughter… because it might bring me closer to the sky above.”–
20) “My friend in middle and high school lived with her grandmother. My friend always wore a lot of makeup because her skin was oily and she had acne while I’ve never had a problem with the bad skin. Anyway, we were riding somewhere and my friend was putting on make up and started complaining about having to do it every day (her grandmother made her wear it if she left the house) and her grandmother turned to us in the back seat and said, ‘If you were as pretty as her, you wouldn’t have to wear it all the time’. We were like fifteen.”–
21) “‘Sometimes you and your brother are the only reason I don’t stick a gun in my mouth or ‘accidentally’ swerve into oncoming traffic.’ Not exactly ‘bad’ in the sense that it puts us down because he’s essentially calling us his reason to live, but dang…if it isn’t freakin’ morbid. Especially when you say it to an 8-year-old.”–
22) “After my father ended his life, I called up his family to see if anyone was willing to let me and my siblings stay at their houses (they live 5 states away) to bury him in his home state where the rest of his family is buried. They all declined and my no-good uncle told me, ‘And we ain’t got no money for no burial, you all are on your own.’ Also got told by my mother that it was my fault I got taken advantage of, from 9-15 years old, because I never told on him.”–
23) “My mom died when I was 9. My dad remarried about three years later. My stepmom heard me call her my stepmom to my friend (it went something like: ‘My stepmom says I can go at 5’). She heard this and flew into a fit of rage. She said to me: ‘Your mom is dead, I’m your mom now. Don’t call me your stepmom.'”–
24) “‘I wake up every morning wondering if maybe today is the day I die and you won’t have to deal with me.’ My dad, about once a week. He’s got a progressive loss of motor control and I put my life on hold to help take care of him. I wish he believed me when I tell him he’s anything but a burden to me.”
Degrading Kids At Impressionable Ages…
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25) “Sad story… I was at Costco shopping and getting samples, and I see this brat kid running about. She was not listening to her stressed out mom and grabbing everything to look at it and wandering around for samples. The dad comes to the cart with a couple items, sees the little fart running around, and bellows, ‘GET YOURSELF OVER HERE, YOU FREAKIN’ BRAT.’ She didn’t even listen until he came and grabbed her and jammed her in the cart.”–
26) “My best friend’s mom is full of fantastical one-liners that would make even grown men cry. When I was 18, I got my belly button pierced and I went over to my best friend’s house to show her. Her mother walked into the room and said, ‘Hey best friend, I’ll let you get a belly button ring too…as soon as you lose your pot belly and are as skinny as her.’ Then she just left the room as casually as she walked in.”–
27) “Years ago I worked at a landscape store. When someone needed bags of dirt, mulch etc., they would pay for it inside, then drive around back to have someone load it up. We were short handed that day and the cashier forgot to make the call out to the yard. So I’m walking near that area and am greeted by a dad and his high school age son with, ‘Well, it’s about time.’ The guy was really put out that I was taking his precious minutes away but I began loading his order up without complaint. He kept huffing and puffing while I worked. As I’m finishing up the load, he says to his son, ‘See son, this is the reason you stay in school – so you don’t have to do a job like this and be like this guy’. I loaded the last bag and said, ‘There you go. I’m sorry for the delay. By the way, this is my second job that I work, while getting my second college degree and supporting my wife and young son.’ The son kind of snickers and the dad’s mouth pops open. ‘You can’t talk to me that way. I’ll go to your manager and have you fired’. I said, ‘Well, my manager’s name is Patrick and I’ll be happy to go with you to help you find him. He’ll probably think you’re a useless human like I do and most likely since I’m one of the most dependable employees here, I’m not going to get fired. If I do though, its okay because, like I said, I’m just doing this for some extra money. You, on the other hand, will always be a jerk and feel the need to insult people based on your assumptions and insecurities. Have a nice day’. The son stood there with a grin on his face. I can’t help but believe he’d probably wanted to say something to his dad like that a million times but that he couldn’t because of the repercussions from this low life. That moment, made working at that job for the 9 or 10 months I was there, worth it.”–
28) “My stepmom hates my sister with passion in which I’ve never seen someone hate another person before. She constantly mocks her weight, scrutinizes everything she does and has admitted to starting horrific fights with her because my stepmom is ‘bored’. The worst thing I can remember her saying to my sister was Thanksgiving four years ago. It’s my sister’s favorite holiday. My sister went to get another piece of pie and my stepmom ripped it from her hands and told her, ‘You’re too fat to have another piece.’ In reality, my sister is underweight…”–
29) “The things I’ve been told, by my mother. Let’s see here. I’ve been told that the only reason any man would ever love me would be my chest size. I’ve been told, while I was in elementary school, that if I wanted to be cool in high school I would need to smoke. When I moved out (at a very young age – I found a way to get away) her last words to me were, ‘Call whenever you want, just don’t dare call collect.’ When she came to visit me (last time I’ve ever seen her), she brought another girl my age and spent our entire visit at the mall buying things for this other girl. ‘I’ve adopted her’, she told me. She’d buy her a pair of pants, and if I commented on ‘Oh, those are nice’ or anything similar, my mother would look at me and say ‘Yeah, they are too. Too bad they don’t make them for fat people, hey?’Yes. I … yes.”–
30) “I worked on a checkout, and a woman came through with her 10-year-old son, who was quite fat. The kid was eating a large serve of chips and gravy he had bought from the deli, and looked kind of sad. He turned to his mum and said, ‘Mum, you sure this is food won’t make me fat?’ Mum didn’t even turn around, just said, ‘Of course not, just eat it’. Sad face…”–
31) “There are so many it’s hard to just pick one. After a crippling on the job back injury, I was laid up for two years before I could get a new job. When the time came and I started looking for jobs online, my Dad said: ‘You will never get a job by searching online. You should apply to McDonald’s – you’re such a disappointment, that at this point, the best I could hope for is that by the time you’re 40, you’re a fast food assistant manager.’ Two months later I was hired by a video game company from an online application and became fairly successful. He never apologized nor admitted he was wrong. My mother is a very verbally abusive person who I could spend hours talking about. One that sticks out: she loved calling my ex-fiancée ‘worthless’ to her face. She was the nicest, most sensible girl, but because she dated me, my mother considered her worthless. She once asked her, ‘Do your parents know you sleep around with every loser you meet?’ I’ll never forgive my mother for the part she played in driving that girl away.”–
32) “My fiancé’s mom constantly projects her own insecurities about weight onto her 15-year-old daughter (his little sister). His mom (J) eats maybe once a day, and pops so many pain pills, Charlie Sheen would be impressed. Daughter (S) is a BEAUTIFUL girl who is THICK, not fat. She plays basketball, volleyball, golf, and softball. This chick is in shape. But, her mother will say things like, ‘And here’s my fat daughter now! Come here, tubby!’ to the customers at the business our family owns, that she ‘manages.’ And things like, ‘S, boys your age don’t want a fat girl. They want a girl who they can show off. Like your friend Maddie! She is so beautiful. You want to be beautiful, don’t you? Because right now, you aren’t, you’re fat. ‘J is married to a man 15 years her junior and is deathly afraid he will leave her when she starts showing her age. My fiancé also struggles with insecurities about his weight, even though he is 6’3 and 192 lbs. His older sister deals with many eating disorders. I finally flat out asked my fiancé if his mom spoke to them the same way she speaks to S, and he hung his head and begrudgingly told me yes, she did. I can’t say how much this bothers me. I can feel his pain sometimes, and it absolutely breaks my heart that I can’t help. I do everything I can to positively raise him up, and it has worked a little. But he is the most handsome man in the world, and I know he’ll never know it.”–
33) “My cousin was venting about his depression to his stepfather. The stepfather being the ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps’ type, he told him to suck it up and that he was acting like a baby. It escalated from there. Then his stepfather told him, during an argument over the phone, ‘Why don’t you just go kill yourself if you are so depressed?’ Two hours later, my cousin committed suicide. He was 15. The stepdad received a lot of backlash from our family, but no legal punishment. He expressed grief and apologized for what he did but that doesn’t change anything. He seems very shut down from it all now. My aunt (his mom) is in severe denial over it all believing it was an accident (he didn’t leave a note or any goodbyes) and the stepdad has jumped on board.”–
34) “I have several friends whose stepfathers apparently have no qualms about picking huge fights with them while there’s company over, to the point that I’m not sure I know anyone who actually gets along with their stepfather. In my own family, when I was nine my grandmother told me, ‘If you eat a slice of pie, you’ll weigh 300 pounds, in high school,’ and other really nasty things about my weight, to the point that when I started high school and didn’t weigh anywhere close to 300 pounds, it felt like a major accomplishment.”