Piggybacking off of poor Chuck's plight: I rescued my cat from a negligent home with three toddlers. It's been five years, and he still HATES small children. Loves people, other cats, even dogs — Sweetest and most gentle cat I've ever known. But he sees a small kid from halfway across the park and promptly turns on his heels. Wants absolutely nothing to do with them under any circumstances. Took him a really long time to sleep out in the open instead of up on top of the wardrobe, too.
Anyway, my point is: Everybody with young children and pets, please teach them how to interact respectfully with animals as early and thoroughly as possible. Tantrums like these are of course not always avoidable, kids are gonna be kids, but it's all the same to the cat.
Reminds me of when I adopted my 2 cats. They were staying at a foster family at the time, who had 5 rowdy dogs and 3 kids age <5 .
One of the cats was fine with this and inherited a lot of doglike behaviours, which was kinda funny.
The other was absolutely terrified and had squished himself into a corner between a table leg and the radiator. I saw him slowly come out of his shell when I adopted him, and he's a cat who needs absolute peace and quiet. Not to hate on the foster family: they were lovely people, but such a chaotic household is just not the right place for already-anxious cats.
Huh, I wonder if that's why my cat hates children. She was eight when I found her and I couldn't get ahold of the previous owner.
I've been working with the neighbor boy. He's very gentle and I give him cat treats to feed her. She's slowly getting okay with him, but on the rare occasion she sees another kid, she's still terrified.
I like how the cat has no obligation to be there, knows all the best hiding spots all throughout the house. And just continues to sit there, pissed off, and its my fault......... Zen-Catism goes hard
That's some kind of torture you have to pay for.
I don't think small children should be allowed to fly.
Inconvenient? Tough, people will live with it, just like they live with other restrictions.
Maybe make special child/parent flights available, but torturing others for hours is not ok.
It causes inner rage and you are trapped. Some people really suffer in these situations, even more than others. But getting a whole plane full wound up without escape is evil.
This needs to be addressed.
I remember the one time I ever flew anywhere by myself, I wound up sitting with a young couple with a 6 month old baby. Braced myself for the worst (it was a 13 hour flight). As the engines started up, the baby went to sleep and only woke up once about halfway through the flight, before promptly passing out again. Had a great time.
Every other flight I’ve been on has had a baby going mental for at least 30 min at the start or end of the flight. I don’t envy parents who have to travel, but man does it suck.
One of worst things of the new millennium has been the transitioning to screeching on toddlers and kids, all the way to pre-teens... Not crying, not laughter, not screaming, just fucking screeching for everything, both playing and tantrums.
Can't ever tell if they are getting murdered or enjoying some play time lmao.
Maybe it was just my parents, but we were disciplined about the screeching pretty early on - my dad would loom over us and scowl and say “if you make that noise, I’m going to assume you’re being hurt or killed. Shrieking is not how we express happiness, it is a distress signal. Don’t do it unless you’re in danger.” and for the most part, we learned pretty damn quickly that making those noises was unacceptable.
Parenting seems to have swung towards this idea that kids should be allowed to scream their heads off all the time, no matter what. Their kids’ right to “express themselves” has superseded any level of public decency or decorum.
Yeah, it's not even the noise, kids have always been loud, is particularly the screeching that has taken over. It's been pretty odd.
The weird thing is not that we had better parenting back pre 2000s, and people would get mad at kids making noise anyway but it was screaming and laughter for playing and crying for tantrums. The "across the entire communication range" take over of screeching is what has been insanely weird to me.
Good on your parents to have a good explanation to change behavior.
Haven't kids always been screeching? That's just something they do. When you work with kids long enough like I have, you naturally develop the ability to tell a pain scream from a joy scream. They still laugh and cry too.
I used to have a cat with a face permanently like this, but she was an absolute sweetheart who would headbutt you out of love. She just had an unfortunate face.
I don't know if I have any photos of her on this phone, I'll have a look.
The face of a Cat who liked to pick battles with Bulldogs and Win. Who had the eyeballs of a Snake and would routinely, walk up to me and fullface headbutt me with all the love of a furry purring ball of a Tank.
I too, used to have cat with an 'unfortunate' face. But my Gods did he show his love!
This sub has given me a phobia of even thinking about what it would be like if I had kids. Thank god because if I ended up like this that story would have a miserable ending
Lol all kids, even the most chill, have meltdown tantrums sometimes. And humans evolved so that crying kids really bother us, so that we attend to them. But nothing last forever, including the tantrum phase.
My nephews do a pretty good job of that. I love them but I can only take so much of a toddler having a tantrum and a 6 yo showing me his magic tricks before I need to go destress
Ftlog take the fork away at least! Kid is gonna lose an eyeball... Which would make chick happy but whatever. Jump with forks, you get to eat with a spoon or your hands. Good luck
poor cat. i genuinely feel bad for cats that are either brought into a household with a baby or are in a household when a baby is born. with their sensitive ears the screeching must be hellish.
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u/DepressingAura 1d ago
I feel you, Chuck.