My kids are embarrassed

Okay, well this is not a crisis. I have 2 daughters in elementary school and they think they are pretty cool. I have to agree. I think they're pretty cool, too. But my kids have said a few times that they're embarrassed of me at school and stuff. Mostly because I'm a hippy or whatever.


Now, I don't put any effort into having some "hippy" look. I think I look really tame compared to before I had kids. Also, as I explained to my kids, I really don't give a rats ass what some first grade girls think about my freaking clothes and jewelery. It's not an issue.

I have told my kids that I am sorry that they're getting hassled, but I am an adult and I am not going to go out of my way to look different to satisfy their classmates.

Has anyone else had similar experiences?

 

I think most kids are embarrassed of their parents for some reason at some point of their lives.

 

Yup, I also think most kids are embarrassed of their parents at sometime. They'll one day appreciate more of who you are and care less about what you wear.

 

agree to everything they said but want to add that its not so much them being ambarrased by YOU but being embarrassed about being teased aboiut the hippy mom
if it wasnt that though it would be something else
kids are dumb and cruel and teasse everyone over anything

 

i agree with the others... don't sweat it. eventually they'll cease to be embarassed. when i was little i had classmates tell me how cute/pretty my parents were.... lol my parents were also really young though, they were 18 when they had me.

 

I dunno, I'm still embarrassed by my mom...


But I disagree that it happens to everyone. I've noticed that in my circle of homeschooling friends, even the teenage girls are very respectful of their parents, and the kids aren't mean to each other like I remember from my own public-school days.

 

Yeah, maybe you're right.


I've tried to approach this a few different ways with my kids. First of all, my almost-seven-year-old (she's counting the hours until Sunday) hassled me about my tie-dyes. She also won't wear the tye-dies to school that she happily wears to festivals in the summer time. I don't care, as long as she doesn't look like a slut she can wear whatever she likes, pretty much. (Even though she begged me to buy those same tie-dyes! Borrowing her words-"WHATEVER!!")

So the first thing I told her was that in a few years the other kids will discover tie-dyes and stuff and they'll realize that she's been wearing them since preschool! How cool is that. She'll score some points having a hippy mom when she gets older.

Then we were talking about this in front of my mom. My vegetarian, dreadlocked, tie-dye wearing, concert going (you get the picture) mom, and my mom told her that hippy is her culture. She said that her own grandmother was a beatnik in her time and she raised her kids (me) in the counter-culture and that conformity is highly overrated.

That helped a little, but not totally. My kids do have more fun with her than with their "square" or what my mom calls "straight" grandparents.

Then my kid was lamenting that the popular girls are so mean. I told that if something is popular it means that lots of people like it. But hardly anybody likes the popular kids because they're snotty and rude. So she should just be friends with nice kids and not worry about the 'popular' kids.

So, whatever. I wish she didn't stress so much about this. My mother used to say, "Don't worry about what people think. Most of them don't."

 

Teach her that she can be embarressed all she wants but she must respect you and deal with it. Like was stated previously kids will get embarressed sometimes. I would have never told my parents they embarressed me though, I was taught to respect my elders even when I didn't agree with them.

 

We've continuously embarrassed our kids over the years. At some point ours got over it. Our boys were tortured over mom being at little league games with unshaven armpits and a tank top on. All of our kids have been embarrassed over my 35 year old pickup truck and have begged to get picked up from middle school socials in anything else. The fact that we have no commercial power and use an outhouse is something they did not tell their peers. It's has to do aother kids and the attitudes they learn from their parents about folks outside the norm. I'm happy to say it all seems short lived or is more of a phase. In the end all our kids have been proud to be ours.

 

Yep. Wouldn't matter if you were June Cleaver. No matter what you do and how you act, your kids will be embarrassed by you. I remember years ago, my oldest, Sunshine, was embarrassed by my clothing and Birkenstocks and said, "Can't you wear regular mother shoes?" I said, "No, I am not a regular mother."

Just yesterday, Sage and I were making cookies, and a damn fly, I had been trying to get rid of for days was buzzing around the cookies.

I took the oven mitt and swatted the thing, and got it and yelled "AHA, that's what you get for trying to shit on our cookies, vermin! Bwahahahhaaaaa!!!!"

Sage looked at me and said, "I don't think the other mothers at school would have done that."

I said, "What, swatted a fly?"

"No," She said, "Swatted it and then yelled 'Bwahahaaaa!'afterward and then said a swear word." she had already started to smile at me.

So I asked her if maybe they would have straightened their button down shirts, put on their Bass shoes, climbed into their Hummers and gotten a hotel room for the night and called an externinator, she started to laugh and said, "I think that's what some of them would have done."

I said, "I'm cooler than them."

She said, "Yeah, mama, you are."

She just turned seven. Smart kid.

 

aww that just made me almost cry! I hope thats how it is for me and my kids when they grow up!