I remember being achildand assuming that adults were magical beings who knew everything. They’re older and wiser, so they must have my best interest at heart! But as we gain life experiences, we are often confronted with the harsh reality that not all adults are good-hearted. In fact, many can be extremelycruel.Redditors have beenrecallingthe pettiest things that adults ever did to them when they were children, so we’ve gathered their most upsetting stories below. Frombullyingstudents in a classroom to making rude remarks that left a lifelong impact, these memories are heartbreaking to read about. But perhaps they’ll inspire you to be even kinder to thechildrenin your life!This post may includeaffiliate links.
I remember being achildand assuming that adults were magical beings who knew everything. They’re older and wiser, so they must have my best interest at heart! But as we gain life experiences, we are often confronted with the harsh reality that not all adults are good-hearted. In fact, many can be extremelycruel.
Redditors have beenrecallingthe pettiest things that adults ever did to them when they were children, so we’ve gathered their most upsetting stories below. Frombullyingstudents in a classroom to making rude remarks that left a lifelong impact, these memories are heartbreaking to read about. But perhaps they’ll inspire you to be even kinder to thechildrenin your life!
This post may includeaffiliate links.
I was at an Easter Egg hunt when I was around 6. It was in a big park area with lots of rocks. I saw a little chocolate egg foil glisten and ran over to pick it up. As I reached my hand out to pick it up a man trod on my hand to stop me getting it, then he called his kid over to “find” it.
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When I was in like 5th grade I didn’t put a book cover on my math book. It required cutting up a paper bag something similar (we couldn’t really afford the fancy ones) and I just never did it. So my math teacher took away my math book, so I couldn’t do homework or follow along in class. Like WTF, who does that to a kid. When my mom found out she went down to the school and RAISED HELL about interfering with my right to an education or something. The school district was terrified of her until I graduated.
My sixth grade teacher didn’t like me, I had transferred into her class when the TaG teacher was needed elsewhere, and this teacher was resentful. She was going to have the class read The Hobbit (long, long before any movies). I was excited, I had ready read it and the Trilogy the year before. She called me a liar in front of the whole class, then went on a tirade about how kids like me were terrible and thought we were better. I was a quiet shy girl, and cried. She mocked that too. The rest of the year was hell, she let her pets (officers' kids, it was a school near a Navy base) bully me. I was never good enough. She couldn’t fail me because I excelled at bookwork, but she picked on me at every turn. Trash human.
To find out how this conversation started in the first place, we reached out to the Reddit user who posed the question, “What was the most petty thing an adult did to you when you were younger?”
We were almost out of ice cream, I made myself the last bowl. I came into the living room to eat it and my dad took it and ate it all because I didn’t offer him any. I was about 8. I’m 41 and I still hide while eating bowls of ice cream.
On the wedding day of my moms third wedding, I sat in my room alone crying cause it was hard, but I made sure to remove myself cause I didn’t want to upset my mom. When my aunt came to check in on my and saw I was crying, she went and told my mom. My mom went out of her way to stop hair and makeup to come into my room for being selfish and trying to ruin her happy day, even though I purposefully tried to not look upset in front of her in the first place.Edit: Oh wow guys I took a nap and wake up and I’ve gotten my first awards and this is my top comment ever! Thank you so much.To address some of the questions that have come up, yes she is still married to her third husband and I’m grateful for it now because he ended up being great for her even though he had quite the rocky start with me. My mom also finally went to therapy after I had already grown and left the house and was diagnosed properly and given the help she needs and we now have a solid relationship and she still regularly apologizes for the things she did growing up. While still have some childhood baggage, I’ve built a very happy life for myself and will definitely use what I learned from my childhood to be a better mom to my kids if I ever have any.
I broke two fingers on my dominant hand in 9th grade and had a splint on them so I couldn’t write. I had a test at school and the teacher made me write with my left hand then marked my answers wrong because she couldn’t read them.
At 16 years old, I had a job at a gas station after school. Did all the grunt work (sweeping cigarettes in the parking lot, emptying trash bins, etc.).I’m taking the trash out one day and a grown a*s man in his 40s comes up to me and says something along the lines of “I make more money in a week than you do in a whole year” and all I could think at the time was “Well yeah, I sure hope you do I’m in high school”.Such a petty thing to say to a kid just trying to make a little bit of money after school.
“Some tenants showed up and were introduced to me. A couple from Detroit was also there. I noticed the boyfriend being distant but thought nothing of it, and there were no interactions between us whatsoever,” the author continued. “A few weeks later, the girlfriend came up to me and told me I needed to apologize to her boyfriend. I asked why. She said, because I was making fun of him the day I arrived, and he held a grudge since then.”
I was feeling sick one day in grade 3 or 4 and the substitute teacher wouldn’t let me go to the nurse’s office because “I didn’t look sick enough.”I had strep throat.
I got a 0 on a history assignment in fourth grade because I “improperly cited a source” for one of the pictures I used, meaning it was plagiarism. The citation I used was from the educational website I got the picture from, and it was to the format she wanted. I simply forgot a period at the end. F**k you Ms. Easton. This was at least 2 decades ago and I’m just remembering it.
We also asked the OP why she thinks adults are petty towards children so often. “I guess they think they can get away with [it] easily. Many children are also taught to ‘respect their elders’, which makes it harder to stand up for oneself when facing someone with seniority,” she shared.“The ‘adults’ who acted petty were maybe stressed and used the opportunity to vent and let out some steam and frustrations. Which, in my opinion, does not excuse their bad behavior. Without getting too philosophical here, I think most ‘adults’ are just children with forced on responsibilities,” the author added.
We also asked the OP why she thinks adults are petty towards children so often. “I guess they think they can get away with [it] easily. Many children are also taught to ‘respect their elders’, which makes it harder to stand up for oneself when facing someone with seniority,” she shared.
“The ‘adults’ who acted petty were maybe stressed and used the opportunity to vent and let out some steam and frustrations. Which, in my opinion, does not excuse their bad behavior. Without getting too philosophical here, I think most ‘adults’ are just children with forced on responsibilities,” the author added.
In elementary school I use to talk to the lunch lady everyday and then the one day I didn’t say hi she came to my lunch table and told me I was fake, phony, and a few other things and stopped speaking to me. I still don’t understand what her problem was.
Had a teacher in kindergarten threaten to expel me because I was sick and didn’t show up the day before. She put me on the spot in front of the whole class telling me not to lie and that she’d call the principal. I cried in front of the whole class not knowing what to do. Apparently she wanted to win some attendance award and thought confronting a child was a good idea. Like bruh I was fking 5.Still salty on how she got away with it.
Finally, the OP added what she thought of the replies to her post. “What stood out to me in those answers was how many figures of authority just straight up abused their position to be a bully, but I wouldn’t call it surprising.”
I was in middle school at a friend’s sleepover. Her parents were very strict, she and her siblings got pulled out of public school to go to a Catholic school (were homeschooled in high school), and they scared the hell out of me.Anyway, it was probably like 11pm at this sleepover, and her mom hesitantly let us watch the Disney movie Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century. I laughed at a part, and even though her parents were awake, they came into the living room to scold me for being too loud. Not long after, I took a drink of water, choked, and started coughing.They called my parents after 11pm to come pick me up because “I couldn’t behave.” They had no regard for them being asleep and having jobs to get to early in the morning, they wanted me out for laughing and coughing in the span of about 10 minutes.My parents never let me stay the night at her house again, and are still pissed at them for doing that almost 20 years later.
I did a chore that my father had asked me to do. My mom got home and commented on how nicely the chore was done. My father took credit for it in front of me - so I fired back saying that I was the one who had done it… he then yelled at me and called me a traitor.
A math teacher handed back our tests in class. They were graded and marked and all that. She was going over some of the questions that most people got wrong (myself included), so I was writing down some notes on my test so I could reference it later and remind myself why I got things wrong and what I was supposed to do. She ripped my test away from me and started screaming at me that cheating is absolutely not allowed and that I should be ashamed of myself. Confused and in shock, I started choking up and tried to explain that I was just trying to take notes. One of the most humiliating times of my childhood (around 13 years old), and I still don’t understand why it happened.
Preschool me wasn’t sure if shaking hands should come after or before getting awarded a prize on stage. Adult snatched my prize out-of-reach to hall full of guffawing adults. Preschool me burst out in tears and was led off-stage. Parent scolded me for making her look bad.Edit: my form teacher passed the prize to parent later when we were seated. Prize giver was a local celebrity.
One of my uncles was in a years-long fight with my mom. To stir trouble, any time he greeted my sister and I, he would tell my sister how beautiful and wonderful she is and to me just say “Oh, you’re here too” and then promptly ignore me the rest of the night. I used to adore him up to that point so this ended up in me being extremely hurt and crying to my mom for hours about how I’m ugly and not special.He got his petty vengeance on my mother and crushed my self-esteem. Till today I don’t forgive him for it.
I got in trouble in 6th grade for reading during home room. Home room was like a random 30 min period to work on homework but I always did my homework the night before so I would just quietly read. For some reason my home room teacher hated it. One day she just yelled at me for always reading in her class and told me to do my homework. I told her all of my homework was done. She told me to prove it so I showed her all of my completed homework. Then she confiscated my book and sent me to the principal’s office for being disrespectful. I’m still salty about it.
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I wrote a letter to my Grandma that died on Christmas day and put it in her casket at her funeral. My aunt took it out and gave it back to me and told me I couldn’t do that. I was 6
In grade four, a teacher gave us a few questions before lunch break and expected us to answer each of them correctly right after the break was over. A classmate couldn’t get a few answers correct so the teacher made him walk to each bench and get a slap from each student present in the class.Thinking about the incident now, I feel like going back in time and beat the s**t of that horrible teacher.
When I was young my mum was best friends with one of the neighbours down the street, who also had a boy the same age as me. As a result I played a lot with said boy and was encouraged to be best friends with him. Whenever my mum wasn’t around though, his mum was a complete b***h to me. She would come out to where we were playing together and shout at me for some minor trivial thing. If we were both doing something bad (only minorly bad, we were not bad kids) she would blame it all on me and never reprimand her son at all.This was all when I was like 7-10 years old and so I couldn’t process it at all and had no idea how to react and it really got to me. I found out years later she was basically jealous because I was doing much better at school than her son and she wanted to ‘take me down a peg’. Ultimately the son and I ended up going to different secondary schools and drifted apart, which meant that fortunately I stopped having to interact with her.Our mums are still good friends and she has always been pleasant to me as an adult (she even did the flowers at my wedding), but even 30 years later I still keep her at arms length because of how unfairly she treated me as a child.
I was 7 or 8 years old, living in a certain US state where the vast majority are of a certain religion - I am not of the same religion.I was playing outside with all the neighborhood kids and one of the parents came outside and told everyone that her child was having a birthday party next week and we were all invited … “except you” as she pointed to me. And it was absolutely because I didn’t go to church with them.
I finished a clay sculpture in art class and the teacher asked if I wanted to go to the principals office (in a way that implied I would be in trouble) for poking holes in the leftover clay I had. I am guessing she did this because she was in a bad mood. I told her I did want to go explain exactly what I did wrong. She realized how dumb she would look. I did not go to the principals office that day.
My dad’s drunk friend smashing my 7 yo face into a bowl of whipped cream. You know the old trick, “smells funny doesn’t it ?“Yeah, funny enough to have my nose broken with shards of ceramic planted in my nostrils !
When I was probably around 8 or so I was at a baseball game with my family. Naturally I was hoping I’d be able to get a ball and one of the players saw me in the stands looked directly at me and threw a ball to me. Then some guy probably college aged proceeded to reach over my shoulder and snatch the ball before it got to me. I turn around and he and all his friends are laughing and celebrating. Almost 20 years later I’m still a bit salty about it.
Confiscating my phone for a whole week for listening to classical music while studying.
I have horrible handwriting. I have forever, no amount of intervention or practice has helped. When I was in 5th grade, my Social Studies teacher seemed to take a lot of pleasure in constantly reminding me of how awful my hand writing was. We used to have to bring out notebooks up for her to check our homework. I dreaded this so damn much. She would hold up my notebook so the whole class could laugh at my handwriting. I’m grown now, that was a long time ago, but I still hate to have hand write anything that other people will see.
When I was like nine or ten, I was rollerblading home from my mom’s work, right? And I’m heading down 4th Street, and I find something like 16 dollars on the ground–a ten, a five, and single–just laying there on the sidewalk next to some outdoor seating at a cafe.Being the obnoxiously nice kid that I was, I pick it up and kind up look around, wondering if anybody lost their money.That’s when the lady in the weird sweater vest comes around the corner. We make eye contact and I tell her I found this money, and she goes, “Huh. Let me see it.” And my naive as is like, “Oh yeah, that makes sense. She’s a grown up, she can sort this out.“She looks around, hands me the single back, puts her finger to her mouth in a shhh! gesture, THEN SHE JUST F**S OFF, NEVER TO BE SEEN AGAIN.
Grounded me for leaving a hanger on the dryerThen extended it for reading while groundedThen further for sleeping when told I can’t read. S**t still pisses me off years later..
When I was ten, an aunt told me to “stop eating so much, or you’ll get fat like your parents and sister”. I believe that was the first time I’ve ever wanted to clock someone.P.S. that aunt was 100 pounds heavier than either one of my parents at the time, and is close to 200 pounds heavier now, while both of them have lost 75+.
More indirectly to me, but when I was graduating high school my aunt asked me which of my late grandfather’s rings I’d like as a graduation gift, along with a card/a little cash. I told her I really appreciated the offer, but jewelry just isn’t my thing and that I felt like it would be wasted on me (I do have other items passed down from him). She said ok no problem and I thought that was that.Graduation came and went and a couple weeks later a few family members are over for dinner. Well I’m standing talking to another aunt (her sister) and she walks over to us and hands me a little box. At this point I know what it is and even though I had respectfully declined before, I decide I’m going to open it and give a “wow! great thank you!".I open the ring’s box and before I can get a word out the Aunt I had been there talking to absolutely LOSES IT. “Are you F##×ING KIDDING ME? You give THAT ring to HIM?!!”. Yelling at her, yelling at me, making a huge scene. Guess that ring specifically was one she had made known she wanted. I look to my aunt who gave me the ring and she just couldn’t hide the little smile on her face.So the extreme pettiness was really between my two aunts, and I felt like I was basically set up/used as a tool in the whole situation. Would have felt bad for my other aunt, but tbh most of her anger was directed towards me. She did apologize days later. Should mention I had a few friends over as well witnessing this. Just super embarrassing for me especially since I had zero interest in the ring.
My swimming teacher promised me a candy bar if I jumped off the board when I couldn’t swim and when I did they said they forgot ,but I saw them eating one in the lounge. I was 5 and I was betrayed.Another thing that swim teacher did instead of teach me to swim was to try and teach the group how to keep their eyes open underwater and see. We all had goggles and had to take them off to do this.Also I didn’t learn to swim there I ended up learning at a hotel on vacation when my sister taught me like a year later.
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Mantas Kačerauskas
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