>The Tattler
>We had a kid over to play the other day, one I’ve “affectionately” begun referring to as The Tattler.
To myself, anyway.
“Um, Miss Lindsay,” he called to me urgently from the playroom five minutes after he arrived. “Miss Lindsay!” I ran over to the door.
“Yes?”
“Bruiser hit me!”
I frowned. “Bruiser,” I said sternly. “Do not hit Alex! We do not hit!” Bruiser looked up at me from where he was playing on the carpet. He seemed confused. I watched him for a moment, then went back into the kitchen. Two minutes later, Alex called me again.
“Miss Lindsay!” he screeched. “Miss Lindsay! Bruiser hit me again!”
I ran back to the playroom, a little surprised that Bruiser hadn’t listened. Alex stood at the top of the playroom stairs, lips pursed, holding a floppy stuffed animal. “He keeps hitting me with this horse,” he reported.
I paused. An 18-month-old “hitting” a five-year-old with a soft stuffed animal was not something I needed to know about.
“Oh. Well, Alex, if he does it again, just tell him to stop.” Alex’s eyes widened.
“Okay,” he said dubiously. He returned to the playroom. Four more minutes passed.
“Miss Lindsay!” Alex’s voice was beginning to grate on my nerves. I looked up from my grocery list.
“Yes, Alex?” I asked, not moving.
“Punky took her shoes off!”
“Greeeeeaaaaatttt,” I said. “Thanks for the info, kid.” I could hear Alex breathing noisily at the top of the stairs, apparently waiting for me to come up there and deliver justice. I rolled my eyes. He was going to be waiting a long time.
A few minutes later, Punky and Alex came tumbling downstairs. Punky had reformed, I guess, and decided to put her shoes back on so that they could go out in the backyard and play. I brought Bruiser into the kitchen and let Punky and Alex outside.
Not two minutes later, there was a knock on the back door. I opened it.
“Miss Lindsay,” Alex said primly, “Punky took sand out of the sandbox and threw it on the ground and that’s wasteful.”
“No it’s not wasteful, Alex,” I smiled. “It’s FUN.” His mouth popped open as I gently shut the door in his face. Through the window, I watched as he returned to where Punky was diligently spreading a small pile of sand across the deck. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but there was quite a bit of finger pointing and head shaking involved. I pulled a few cookbooks from the kitchen shelf before hearing another knock.
“What!” I yelled. This was getting ridiculous. I saw Alex’s eyes peering over the door’s window as he stood on his tiptoes. “Miss Lindsay,” he squawked. “The dog next door is barking at another dog.”
I’m not even kidding. The little dude was tattling on a dog. Someone else’s dog.
For a moment, I just looked at him. He continued standing there, waiting. Finally, I gave him a thumbs up. “I’m on it, Alex!” I shouted through the window. He walked away.
I began counting the minutes until Alex’s mom was due back to pick the kid up. I was beginning to understand why she was always so eager for the kids to get together. I tried to imagine Alex at home.
“Mommy, someone took the trash we left on the curb last night.”
“Mommy, that man on TV said it was going to rain today. That’s not very nice.”
“Mommy, my food got cold before I could eat it all.”
At last, she arrived. Exhasted by the incessant tattling, I practically pushed Alex out the front door.
“Bye, now!” I shouted as he clambered into the waiting minivan. “Come back soon!”
I can only imagine what the tattler told his mom about me.
>I think it’s funny that so many personality issues just disappear in the first two years of school. Positive peer pressure and kindergarten teachers are wonderful things.
>HA! In my job as a lunchroom aide I get 45 1st graders and about as many 2nd graders every day tattling back and forth on each other. Stupid stuff – I usually tell them to work it out.
>Eventually, he’ll figure out what’s really important. But wow, would that grate on your last nerve!
>Ah yes, I remember those “tattle” days. Drove me nuts, both when my kids, and when the other kids who couldn’t take a breath without commenting on it, did it.However, I feel a bit sorry for this kid. I have to wonder WHY he feels it’s necessary to tattle on everything. Is he needing attention? I know when my kids started that nonsense I would consciously pay more attention to them and the whining, er, tattling, stopped. Just a thought.Incidentally, my response was/is usually, “You’ll live.” *grin*
>In a decade plus of elementary education, and 3+ years of mommy-dom, I often through out (the albeit sarcastic comment of)”and…you’d like me to do what about that?” Often, nothing, they just want me to know ( :
>Blech! I don’t know that I’d have the patience for that!
>Yep, it’s like you`re describing a little boy at our daycare. Most kids tattle a bit, but this is a special kind, the mouth never goes off.Just reading about it makes me mentally grit my teeth.Imagine how out of control things can get when the super-tattler has eigth other kids to tattle about…
>I have a kid like that. He can’t even watch another kid use a toy “wrong”. We call him the fun police.
>Boy that must have been annoying.One of the early lessons I learned in Kindergarten was that, “Nobody likes a rat.” Unfortunately, that has future consequences. Sometimes the tragic happens and no one is willing got rat.Mom, Bobby’s dabbling in heroin!Miss Jones, Bobby stole the missing laptop from school. It’s a fine line. I think that we get the “don’t tattle” beat down so hard, that we fear ratting out the serious as older kids.
>I tell my kids that the only acceptable things to tattle on are blood, flood, fire, life-threatening situations or illness (must be near death). They love to tell on each other, and I just ask under which above category this particular tattle falls under and they usually go away and work it out.I am curious. Did Punky say anything to you about him?
>Punky doesn’t even notice his tattling. She is extremely in to having friends, though, and really doesn’t care what they do- she just loves them for it. I think all preschoolers have their problem areas. Punky’s is that she’s bossy, and I have to work with her on sharing sometimes when her friends are over.I think Alex’s mom must LISTEN to it, and that’s why he does it. He’s clearly used to getting a reaction and he’s always mystified when I do nothing. I think he may have a whole lot of rules at home, too. He leads a very scheduled existence, so I can see how that would be the case.
>That’s funny 🙂 I can’t stand tattling, it’s just obnoxious.You, however, make this funny. But that’s because it wasn’t me having to listen to it!! 🙂
>hahahah rats are really, really annoying, but nothin beats those kids that say “go ask your mom if we can have…”
>I’m annoyed just reading that! I dont know how you managed to tell him he was invited back over!! Kudos to you!
>oh. mai. gosh!
>My kids would have driven me insane if I had listened every single time they insisted on tattling on each other.My response, “That’s nice dear!”Throws them completely off sync.
>Ha ha. I’m exactly the same way.
>We have LOTS of tattle-tailing in the Trenches these days. Not quite sure how to curb it.”Mom, he said he wasn’t my brother anymore.””He said he wasn’t my best friend.””He called me a jerk/idiot.””He said butt/butthole/poop/poopyhead.”(They’re 7, 4 and 3.) *sigh*
>We call it the five-minute news update. My oldest is like this, but has a pre-school teacher who won’t tolerate it. One day she came home and said, “If I tell you what Thomas did today, do you promise not to tell my teacher that I tattled?”
>It got so bad in my house I got to the point where I stopped them before they even got a word out, I could tell by the way they ran to me and would ask “is someone bleeding? broken? Pooping on the floor? Eating staples? No? Then I don’t care!” When that didn’t work a efficiently as I’d have liked I used this tactic:Whoever tattles suffers the same punishment as the person who did it. Really! Shut them right up.
>I am sitting here (at work) dying laughing with tears running down my face. I think the comment about “wasting” the sand, threw me over the edge. Thanks so much for the laugh!angela
>You pulled me out of lurkdom with this one. 🙂 Really funny! “I’m on it” – ’nuff said…
>GOD, I hate the tattling. Our rule is that if no one is hurt or bleeding, we don’t need to know. You can sort it out yourselves.
>Wow!! It’s really hard to host a playdate with a kid you can’t stand. No fun at all:-(
>Sometimes I wish I had someone to tattle to…”He’s guzzling down the last of the coffee and not making anymore!””She stole the parking space she knew I was headed for!””He’s got 22 items and is in the 20 or less line!””She’s not picking up her dog’s poop out of our yard!”Geez, I’d never shut up…..
>my brother tattled on me all the time. mom, brian put me in a headlock. mom brian put me in a headlock…brian put me in a headlock. finally my mom got so fed up she said well break out of it.i thought it was cool she chose my side.
>He’s so going to get his little butt kicked in school.
>Oh, man, that little guy would have made me lose my mind. Tattling is, like, my No. 1 pet peeve. Or make that No. 2. No. 1 is nine year olds who baby talk. ARGH.
>Where would defenseless sand, stuffed animals, removed shoes and dogs-barked-at-by-other-dogs be, without an Alex to right the ship and seek justice for the injustice?A future tabloid reporter or community organizer is knocking on your door, Miss Lindsay 😉
>Lord help you Honey! There is nothing worse than a future gossip columnist…You do know this is where they come from? My nephew tattles…on everyone….all the time. No minor act is safe from his mouth. My Hubby was watched him once for me…I so paid for it later…about two hours after I left he finally gave in a quietly slammed a shot of Tequila…for lunch. By the time I got home Mouth of the South had actually dug the lime wedge out of the trash for proof. Kiddo was floored when I laughed and said,”Just one?” And lord help us he’s 12. My son, also 12, finally put a stop to it at our house….but he won’t tell me how….neither will my nephew. Mixed blessing? Oh well.
>I have tried relentlessly to get my kids to stop tattling but more than anything I would just like to know how to get them to stop fighting. They drive me NUTS I have tried ignoring, saying is he or she bleeding? then work it out. This sibling rivalry if that’s what it is is going to kill me. I know this is a little off the subject but if anyone has any suggestions I would love it.
>Gotta love the tattlers, I think we’ve broken our daughter of it and at least she never tattled on the dog.
>You’d think this kid’s mom would be psycho rule-lady, but my daughter had a friend who tattled, and this friend’s mom was quite laid back (and annoyed by her daughter’s habit.)I read somewhere that young tattlers don’t usually want anyone to get in trouble, they just want credit for following the rules themselves. So when this child would run up to tell me that my daughter had done something wrong, I would say, “and you know that’s not allowed, don’t you!” She would smile and run off and that would be that. This might not work for all tattlers, but it worked for one. I haven’t heard her tattle on her friends for years. Her brothers, of course, are a different story!
>I tried a little of that, but when it’s every two minutes, I just can’t handle it! Having this kid over is too much work!
>This was funny, and so very true!!!!
>I have a 14 month old, Maximilian (Max) and a 2 month old, Evangelia (Eva) and my sister has a 3 year old son, Leum(yes, it’s actually spelt Leum, I’m not kidding), that comes over to play with my son once in awhile. My sister and I catch up on everything going on and Max and Leum play with each other or watch TV. Lately it has been TV. But, also of late, Leum has been tattling on Max or complaining. He will run to the counter and tell me that Max is doing something bad like laughing too loud while he’s trying to watch, or sitting in the best spot to watch TV. The chair with MAX on it. Now he’s complaining about Eva too, she’s whimpering, she’s biting her mitts, she’s drooling. She’s 8 weeks old! My sister is annoyed, it hapens to her 24/7, but she leaves it up to me in my house. I say it’s her call. Max and Leum were playing in the back yard yesterday and Leum came running to the deck, screaming that Max was sliding down the slide too slow. Then that he was Talking wrong. Then that he was crawling and getting dirty. It was ridiculous. I just told him to play with something else if he wasn’t happy sharing a plaything with Max. He gets enough attention and he has everything he could possibly want for, and yet he still complains about EVERYTHING! I told him that in my house unless somebody is hurt, doing something that could get them hurt, there is a fire, or an emergency of another sort, he is not allowed to tattle to me. It’s worked so far! Good luck with Alex, Leum drives me crazy, Alex sounds about the same!
>Oh geez… I went on a field trip with that kid recently. I feel your pain.
>As a kindergarten teacher, I know quite a few tattlers. I have a classroom rule. Is somebody hurt or about to be hurt? (This includes emotional hurting, like bullying.) If so, tell me. If not, it’s tattling, and I don’t want to hear it, thanks! It took a few weeks to get the message across, but now the kids are getting pretty good at discerning the difference.
>This is the funniest thing I have read in a really long time!
>Me: stop tattlingHer: I’m not tattling, I’m TELLING!Gee thanks, kid.
>Sadly, I know some adults at work who have the same inclination.
>My two tattling girls drive me crazy sometimes 🙂
>The good thing is that, for the most part, it will go away on it’s own. If it doesn’t, some other kid will beat it out of him in a few years.