Cold heartless daughter

I was very careful to say I wasn't stigmatising a whole generation.

I was talking about my experience of children and teenagers which has been very poor. I have been on the receiving end of their unpleasantness which has been extreme enough to involve police and anti social behaviour officers who have backed up my assessment of the young people involved.

I know rationally all young people aren't the same and I'm pleased your dd is a compassionate and caring person.

My DD would’ve been mortified at that age to be honest and to some extent so would I! Did you really need two men to help you home OP? I have chronic back issues which mean I am quite prone to trips/falls - I’d much rather deal with it myself than have strangers fussing over me. I’m not sure what you expect an 11yo to do to be honest. She’s not your caretaker and I’m sure she found the situation awkward/didn’t know how to react.

Most definitely not true of my 11year old DD. She is very compassionate and caring. It’s really unhelpful to make such ridiculous generalisations about an entire generation of young people.

I think it’s much easier for kids to show compassion and empathy if they have been shown, consistently, compassion and empathy. It never ceases to amaze me that parents seem to expect kids to show better behaviour than they show themselves.

It’s very damning to describe an 11 year old as “cold and heartless” when she’s still so young. It’s not like she’s torturing small animals, she seemingly struggles with expressing and verbalising appropriate emotions. She’s still a child.

Maybe she was a little shy/nervous to react infront of the 2 blokes?

Meh I was that kid. Wouldn’t have dared to say as I’d get even more drama or depending on her mood abuse , but I definitely thought it. It was always something or other , always the victim.

I’m a very empathetic and sympathetic adult, and it’s other people saying that.

Agree with this. Sounds like it could be written by my mother. I apparently don’t have a heart 🙄 been that way for 30 odd years and no longer speak to her.

The thing standing out to me is that you allowed two strangers to find out where you live whilst you're possibly mildly physically injured. That's poor personal security.

I wonder if your daughter sort of knows that without knowing it - I'm sure she'll have been told not to share her home address with strangers.

On the one hand, maybe she's right and you do overreact to everything.

Or, she's confident she's right but isn't really because she's 11 and whatever your parents do when you're 11 is embarrassing.

Or something's gone a bit wrong between the two of you. It's not wrong to expect some empathy. But it's not generally reasonable to expect adult style emotional support from a child. It isn't her job to manage your feelings. She may be saying 'no' in a dismissive way to being your support person. You'll probably get more support from her if you can be clear that you're ok / you are responsible for your own feelings/ you have other adults you can talk to as well.

Or, maybe she's just not yet able to cope with the idea that you're human and at risk of injury.

Do you fall over a cry a lot then? Is something missing from your post, are you elderly/infirm/disabled? I can’t remember the last time I fell over, certainly not to the extent I cried or had to be helped home.

This. Do you fall over a lot/cry a lot op? Lots of drama going on?
Am actually surprised there's been no mn outrage about the 11yo being home alone!!

so why couldn't you just walk home like a normal person?

I think she may have a point. 2 workmen? Was 1 not enough? 1 might even be too many. Bit of a drama declaring your 11 year old is cold and heartless and making a MN thread about it.

Yes she is a psychopath and will kill you and your canary in your sleep. Feel better?

Watch some of the YouTube videos and workshops on girls with autism by Tony Attwood the worldwide expert on girls with autism - girls hide it a lot easier than boys

This is exactly what I was coming on here to write.

So many opinions when in reality, nobody on this thread knows!!

no one knows if the daughter is ‘cold and heartless’

and no one knows is the op is a drama queen.

detailing what your own child would do, if you’re not a drama queen, is completely irrelevant. It’s not like with like.

Personalty traits can be inherited, so I'm afraid she probably gets this either from her father or someone else in the extended family.

@JadziaD

tweens and teens are usually pretty indifferent to how adults feel

Maybe in small children, but not in tweens or teens, and indifference is not disdain, which is what her reaction was.

I've found that children & teens who were consistently arrogant, heartless or spiteful mostly turn out like that as adults, only they learn to hide it better. Those kind of character traits, like empathy, are deeply ingrained.

Although, who knows what's going on here. There might be undisclosed reasons why she has such reactions.

Wow some harsh comments on here!
wr don’t know OP and how hard she fell, why is the assumption that she’s making a drama out of nothing!?
Her daughters comments and eye rolling don’t mean that OP wasn’t really hurt and jarred by her fall!
Im assuming that the daughter isn’t an overly sympathetic child and this is fairly normal for her?

Agree with this 👆

It depends. Can you look at your own behaviour objectively and examine if you are a bit of a drama llama sometimes? My children have seen me cry but due to something proportionate like a funeral for example. My mother in law on the other hand cries at the drop of a hat and it’s a little bit wearing and attention seeking at times. Your daughter is probably in a bit of an awkward teenage phase where big shows of emotion are a bit embarrassing.

I think if you're doing a considerable amount of crying in front of your daughter and expecting her to comfort you, then this is her way of putting some boundaries in so she's not completely engulfed by your need.

This

I’m blown away by the comments on the first page. Her reaction doesn’t sound normal in my circle. I don’t want to call her mean but she comes across as lacking empathy.

Bloody hell your title is a bit dramatic, no wonder she was embarrassed!

The way this is written rings alarm bells for me. It does sound very dramatic and that you cry and expect sympathy a lot from your DD, and now you accuse her of being 'cold and heartless' which is, again, very self-pitying and overdramatic.

I remember my mum having minor surgery when I was growing up - she would leave the bruises uncovered and hint to strangers that she was being abused. She would give people sob stories and also tell them how awful and unsympathetic I was. So my spidey senses are tingling for this dynamic.

Did you break a bone? It does sound a little dramatic having two men help you home if an ambulance wasn't called. Playing devil's advocate, perhaps OP is a habitual drama queen and the eye-roll was her daughter thinking "not again". The catastrophising of a mere eye-roll is rather telling, essentially insinuating that her daughter is devoid of any empathy and a sociopath in the making.