A mother consoling her sad child.
Every child will inevitably have some moments of self-pity, whether wallowing in despair after missing out on being picked at basketball, not being invited to a party, or blowing it on a test. As parents, our knee-jerk reaction is often to satisfy the child after they cry, “I have no friends” or “I’m not smart enough.”
However, Mary Grass, a behavior analyst and a parent coach who goes by TheFamilyBehaviorist on Instagram, says that parents should reject the impulse to immediately put their arms around the child and say, “There, there, poor baby.”
Grass illustrated her point by sharing a recent situation with her 5-year-old daughter, the middle child of 3. When her daughter said, “Nobody loves me,” she reacted as most parents do by consoling the child and reassuring her that she is loved. But she soon realized that all of her reassurance was teaching the child that self-pity was a way to get attention.
“I have three daughters, so it is very important to me that I do not teach them to be self-deprecating in order to get attention. And so what I realized I was doing was I was teaching my daughter to speak negatively about herself to elicit my attention,” Grass explained. "It took me a few tries, but then I started responding differently."
How do you respond to a child who says, ‘Nobody loves me’?
Instead of immediately reassuring her daughter that she is loved, Grass provides her with space to understand her feelings. “I would say, ‘It's clear you're having some big feelings. When you're ready to talk, you can tell me I'm ready,’” she said. After a few weeks of responding to her daughter’s self-deprecating breakdowns, she noticed a change.
The mother had a dance party with her other 2 kids while her middle daughter was in the shower. Later, the daughter explained that she felt left out. “This progressed so nicely that it got to the point this summer where my middle could say to me, ‘I feel like you're not paying attention to me,’” Grass said. “Now, listen, we also have to work on, there's three of you and one of me, all of that good stuff, but I will take her naming her feeling and coming up to me and telling me directly what she needs over [pouting]” Grass said.
How do you respond to a child feeling sorry for themselves?
Grass ended the video by summing up her approach to dealing with self-pity.
“I don't want to reinforce that pouting. I want her to name her feelings. In this case, I want to give her the ability to come to me and let me know how she's feeling, and I can adjust accordingly,” Grass said. "Instead of swooping in, try to say, 'Hey, you're having some big feelings; let me know when you're ready to talk. I want to talk about this.’"
The commenters loved how Grass explained that parents should do more than simply reassure their children by giving them ways to address their complicated feelings. "I love this; it reinforces that our job is not to simply make them feel better but to teach them to decipher and effectively express their feelings," Jehan wrote in the comments.
Grass’s video is an excellent reminder to all parents that our automatic reactions may sometimes be incorrect. When our children repeatedly exhibit the same troubling behaviors, instead of doubling down on our responses, we should ask ourselves, “Am I reinforcing this behavior or extinguishing it?”
A Generation Jones teenager poses in her room.Image via Wikmedia Commons
An office kitchen.via 
An angry man eating spaghetti.via 
At least it wasn't Bubbles. 
You just know there's a person named Whiskey out there getting a kick out of this. 
An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
- YouTube youtube.com
Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.