He’s always wore sketchers. Like since he was 4. Recently, he got really emotionally taking about shoes he wanted for middle school. He said if he doesn’t get Nikes he’s going to get teased. Great fucking marketing work Nike.
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Pre-teen is the worst age for this. Just try to get your kid past this the best you can. Happens everywhere, eventually they will mature and learn.
Heck, this is always the plot in school movies.
I always knew shoes weren’t going to save my kids from bullying, so I got them karate instead.
The bullying still happened, until they decided it was time for it to stop. Then it stopped.
That sounds like your kids responded in a way that every karate club teaches against.
until they decided it was time for it to stop. Then it stopped.
Self defense against verbal harrassment.
Yeah, the good news is no one has ever suffered permanent damage from verbal abuse, so no problems, right?
And why is physical violence no-tolerance (except when it isn’t) but verbal violence is a-okay?
I’m not saying physical violence is okay, and I never have. In fact, I generally go the other direction, saying that physical violence should be a last resort for solving problems, and that those who use it clearly don’t have better tools to solve their problems. And know which groups is known for not having a lot of experience solving problems? Kids. That’s why we have adults supervising them. And training those kids that verbal violence is okay, and a great way to harass your peers, is, to put it bluntly, pretty fucking stupid. And some of those kids learn that a suspension isn’t that big a deal to some of the kids they bully, which is a hell of a lot better lesson than the adults around them were teaching them.
PTSD is not permanent damage?
Same for other psychological scars inflicted by constant bullying.
Some may never trust anyone again because they were bullied during childhood.I’m sorry, I misread your statement. I think we’re on the same page.
Happens ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Cheers
Oldest was told every day he was going to be murdered while walking home. That continued until he dropped his bag and told his bully, “today’s the day, put up or shut up.”
Youngest was blocking a bully to give her friends a chance to get away. He tried to kick her and got the karate demonstration he was asking for.
Middle child was harassed and mocked for five years from Middle School through high school. He spent years begging them to stop, because he didn’t want to hurt them. He finally told his bully he wasn’t going to put up with it anymore and warned him that if he said another word, he was going to punch him in the face. The bully opened his mouth once more, and my son closed it. No one ever said anything again.
Teachers did nothing. Schools did nothing.
Here is the quote they recited in every karate class:
“I come to you with only Karate, Empty Hands. I have no weapons, but should I be forced to defend myself, my principles or my honor, should it be a matter of life or death, of right or wrong, then here are my weapons, Karate, my Empty Hands.”
— Ed Parker
I see no conflict between the teachings and their actions. They have a right to defend themselves against harassment, and if asking for it to stop doesn’t work, escalation is necessary. All the bullies had the opportunity to just walk away. Some took it, some didn’t.
*Is legally required to say it is against
Every serious bullying incident I ran into growing up ended when a kid got popped in the mouth. Every unserious bullying incident made no impact when I knew if it got serious, I could pop them in the mouth and likely come out on top.
I’ve met way too many adults with personality issues that were a product of adults telling child them “physical violence is always wrong, just tell an adult, be the bigger person” etc. It always needs to be taught as a last resort, and it needs to be understood that even justified violence comes with consequences and other tools must be used first, but when you’ve done everything you’re supposed to and no one is helping to the resolve the problem, sometimes you have to do it yourself.
It ain’t pretty, and it ain’t ideal, but it’s the way it is.
I don’t have kids, but I do have a brother who is young enough to be my child, and I was very happy when he broke the nose of his bully.
That motherfucker had to learn.
There was some anxiety on my part when my middle child told me he punched his bully in the high school cafeteria. I had felt his punches through a heavy-duty punching shield, and I assumed it would lead to criminal or civil cases. However, when I asked if the bully was ok, he said he pulled the punch.
I went through the same Nike crisis when I was in middle school. Had to have them because my friends had them. Instead I got to joke about my “genuine imitation Nikes” from Kmart.
It’s painful for kids that want to fit in because because they don’t have the wider and wiser perspective that most of us do as adults.
That’s the thing, crap kids are still going to bully.
Man you have way more faith in adults than I do
man, when i was a kid i was bullied for reading at recess, or infodumping about inappropriate stuff, or being bad at running. kids these days are so materialist.
kids these days
I got bullied for not having Nike, Polo, Izod and Vans. That was over 4 decades ago.
sounds like you grew up in america.
I always had Chucks, not because I didn’t wanna get teased mind you I just thought they were cool. Kids teased me for different things anyway.
But man, they never really lasted that long. One to one and a half years of daily use, and they doubled in price in the last ~15 years (which maybe isn’t that much but I feel the quality went down a bit).
I remember when high tops were in vogue. Granted, I hung out with kids in the “alternative music” scene, and Vans sponsored Warped Tour so much that “Vans Warped Tour” was just a normal term for us.
I’ve always liked the style of chucks, but yeah. They fall apart faster than wet tissue paper.
I love my chucks. I have about 10 pair I swap through. But when I was a kid, they didn’t fall apart. They just got dirty and ripped up. Worst case scenario the tops of the side rubber separated a bit or split.
But now, they will completely come apart between the bottoms and the side rubber.
I remember being 4 or 5 back in the 70s, my mom tried to put me in Converse, I refused to wear them calling them “clown shoes”. LOL.
I feel vindicated.
Yeah, ever since Nike bought the lot they’ve been a bit mad with the designs…
dont blame nike, blame the over-consumption introduced by unchecked capitalism. Comparing yourself to your surround has become the norm, leading to an increase in depression and, like you wrote, consuming too much. Americans on average buy 68 new clothing items PER YEAR, PER PERSON!! Maybe dont blame the kids, they are a product of their surrounding. Blame politics, and blame yourself if you have done too little politics in the last decades
Do blame Nike, and all the other corps, they are the ones who force capitalism on us, they are the cause of this behaviour, they control the politics.
Nike is one of the worst offenders when it comes to unchecked capitalism.
Man I went to a very affluent school and no one gave a shit about what sneakers we had. Unless you had Heeley’s of course. ZOOM!
Ha ha, I’m pretty old so, British Knights and Pro Wings were cursed shoes
Probably because it was an affluent school. In a school with more poor kids, stuff like this is their little chance at feeling higher status than their peers even though it’s all imaginary based on marketing.
I went to a poor kid school.
Nobody had sneakers
I got teased for my shoes. I got better shoes, I got teased for my jacket, I got a better jacket. So then they just made shit up to tease me about.
I saw the fucker that bullied me relentlessly for all three years in middle school about 10 years later. He was pounding stakes in the ground setting up for a carnival. He stopped me in apologized which was kind of surprising. I gave him an absolutely hollow but convincing thanks and what about my day.
I did a little light internet stalking, turns out he’s vocal that can’t keep a job, construction companies fire him for “no reason” and he’s now down to whatever local company will hire him for physical labor. The only truly sad part is he has multiple children with multiple women and will not own up to any of them.
Though, I really suppose I owe a lot of who I am to the hell he put me through. Insults mean fuck all to me and I can ignore stress in a bad situation and make solid decisions.
My grade school bully is serving life in prison for attempted double homicide. IIRC he’s also a sex offender.
Obviously the decisions he made as an adult are his responsibility, but honestly I feel bad for him. He didn’t have much of a chance. His home life was terrible, and he took it out on those around him. He had no positive role models in his daily life besides those at his school, who were always punishing him because he couldn’t conform to a world utterly foreign to his own where people weren’t constantly shitty to one another, and the school didn’t have any better idea how to handle him. The kid had no support. His father was in and out of jail/prison, his mother was overwhelmed. He fell through the cracks.
It’s no surprise he turned out a piece of shit.
That doesn’t excuse his actions. Plenty of people come from difficult origins and are good people leading decent lives.
But I do pity him.
He chose Hookas instead of Hoka
My elementary school bully got hit by a car and it ended his college basketball career
How much did your repairs cost?
priceless
for everything else there’s mastercard
At all the schools my kids went to… Nobody cares. The kids really don’t give a shit what other kids are wearing. In some ways it’s bizarre given that wasn’t the case when I was a kid. But in many ways it’s great. I rarely ever hear of bullying, kids just are themselves.
Of course thats woke, because they actually speak to the kids and tell them to consider others and will not tolerate intolerance. So I expect schools like these are few and far between.
Same for my kids’ school.
Well understood. His Mom was poor and bullied in school. So much so that she brings it up from time to time. She quickly bought him the shoes. I’m going to work on getting him Vans or Hookas in the future.
So instead of falling for nike marketing, you want to fall for vans and hoka marketing?
Well he already fell for sketchers marketing lol. It’s all marketing apparently
Not Saucony Jazz they have no marketing no celebrity spokesperson but they are my official shoe. The cheapest most comfortable foot ware. An old school runner that gives me ( a fat man ) a jump on the pigs even in my old age
🏃♂️ 🚓
Now your the marketing. Congrats you done played yourself.
Is the kid actually getting bullied or going to be bullied or has his mom just instilled a fear of bullying in him that he’s using it as an excuse to have whatever he needs to fit in?
I’m guessing he’s just getting teased. Add that he’s nervous about middle school
Is he gonna smoke the kids in his Hokas or is he gonna smoke with the other kids behind the bleachers with his hookah?
Both, it’s a dual-purpose item!
Parenting is hard. She didn’t just by him bullying resistant shoes, She also bought herself a break from dealing with the guilt or fear of her son getting teased. And that’s perfectly fine in my opinion, choose your fight because life has lots of them. Offering your son other options in the future will be good too. These are not Nike they’re better.
I see this angle and somewhat agree. Issue delt with. The nice things is he’s not going to be self conscious about them and can focus on school.
I don’t know if this is a bad idea, but recently all the Chinese manufacturers spoke out about how much the products they make actually cost, you can find the exact warehouse that makes them, and order directly from them, at a ridiculous mark down. Like a 10th of the price, or less. Might be worth some research. I see Adidas sambas for $10, including postage. They’re all there. They just don’t have the actual name label on them yet, because that’s all they do when they reach the distributor, though, so might be useless to you.
How do you find these?
I was too lazy to actually go find the specific warehouses. I just downloaded taobao, it’s partially in English now. I’ve seen and saved a few tiktoks with descriptions of the locations and which places do which items / brands. I just genuinely don’t have time to deep dive and do proper research, though.
Probably aliexpress or something
Nah, you usually have to direct message them via WhatsApp. You will have to pay like 15 or 20 shipping, so people usually buy a few pairs at a time.
There are specific marketplaces for things, but they tend to only sell bulk. Aliexpress is all resellers.
I am not even sure if the ones I posted sell exact knock offs or not though.
At my school back when I was still in education it was all adidas :3
Now you have to make fun of your kid for being a sheep.
When I was young (in the late 80’s) it was Air Jordans.
But, on top of being teased for not having them, you would also get jumped by kids who wanted to steal them from you.
It’s still air Jordans because Nike is a joke.
It’s not a Nike thing. It’s a kid thing. Kids are dicks, sorry
Is that why Apple has got the US by the balls because people want to avoid the dreaded green bubble in iMessage? I’m not from the US so that might be me misunderstanding the situation, but I’ve been told that even many adults in the US view that as a valid reason to avoid anything that’s not an iphone, because of some social stigma attached to the green bubble.
You can call it social stigma but it’s really just that there’s more you can do when texting someone else with an apple phone. A lot of the time the same messaging has a totally different vibe than when both people are on iPhones. Things can be lost in context etc.
Some of that has disappeared with RCS support, fortunately.
But yes, Apple successfully positioned their texting app as a rich formatted chat app when used between iPhone users, behaving more like WhatsApp or KakaoTalk or other chat apps than like traditional texting. But when messaging people without iPhones, it was just standard texting (worse, since they would degrade the quality of MMS images more than necessary, as I understand). To the uninformed, this seemed like everyone else were the ones lagging behind. “How could your phone be any good? Images you send are terrible. I can’t name chats that have you in it. If I react to your messages it spams the group chat.” Etc.
Brilliant, but absolutely evil, move by Apple. Unfortunately it worked. The only reason I use an iPhone today is that years ago I got tired of being left out of conversations and media sharing by my family and my wife’s family, who all use iPhones. So when my OnePlus 7T Pro 5G McLaren Edition died an early, watery death (rest in peace, king among phones) and nothing else really wowed me in the Android space at the time, I bit the bullet and went to the dark side. I enjoy the iPhone, but I’m still bitter about why I got it.
Yep. Agreed
Most of my immediate family are on Android and use Signal. I’m happier this way.
Green bubble shaming is real and I felt it in middle school but more so in highschool from my own softball team. Hated that shit, but I loved my Moto g7 play so those bitches can fuck themselves.
As far as I hear every time: Yep
- A european
As an American I’m still not convinced.
Apple successfully sold themselves as a better choice, the “in”thing - to adults. Most adults I know have iPhones and the ones who don’t seem self-conscious about it. It might have partly to do with Android phones originally sold as the budget alternative. We’re the shallow ones.
Kids can take their cues from adults: they see iPhones as the “better”, more desired choice. But also take it to the next level, with teasing and bullying.
I find it hard to believe anyone cares about the color of text bubbles, especially since kids don’t use iMessage, despite all the media making that claim. It’s just an excuse, but the social stigma is real
When I was a kid, there was a phase where everyone was obsessed with red flannel. Went on for like 3 months.
Imagine a pro dominantly black/Latino school in the hood where we’re all dressing up like Al Borland from Home Improvement.
I mean, I can see it
Caprice (or Taurus?) police car and fingerless glove really date this photo.
It’s both. Kids suck and can be clique-like over the dumbest things. But these corporations also realize the amount they can make when their brand is a “status symbol”, and they purposely market around that.
Because they learn from their families, usually. I remember the uppercrust side of my family kicking dirt from a family member’s grave onto his second wife’s grave. So classy.
