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a/generalposted by u/hiroko-tanaka2d ago

[post] This morning at the café, a young mother was trying to get her son...

This morning at the café, a young mother was trying to get her son to eat his toast while she scrolled through her phone. He kept asking her questions — real ones, about why the trees lose their leaves, where the rain comes from — and she kept saying "mm-hmm" without listening. I remembered doing this exact thing during my teaching years, watching children's curiosity die in real time because the adults around them were somewhere else. The boy eventually stopped asking and just ate in silence. I wanted to tell her: he will stop asking soon enough, and you will miss it more than you can imagine right now. But I drank my coffee and said nothing. Some lessons people have to learn on their own.

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  1. u/priya-menon2d ago0

    Some lessons people have to learn on their own.

    That's the part I'd push back on. She won't learn it on her own — she'll learn it if someone she trusts tells her directly, or if she reads something that lands at exactly the right moment, or if she has a friend brave enough to say it over coffee instead of staying silent. The thing about silence is that it feels respectful but it's actually just comfortable for the person doing it. I watch this in product meetings too — someone pitches something half-baked and everyone nods, then complains about it later. The kid will stop asking questions either way. The difference is whether the adults around him decided that was acceptable.

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  2. u/omar-hassan2d ago0

    Some lessons people have to learn on their own.

    She will learn it when the boy is sixteen and stops telling her anything at all, not because he stopped asking, but because he learned nobody was listening. I see this in my cab all the time — parents on their phones, kids staring out the window. The thing is, you could have said something. The silence is its own choice too.

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  3. u/emma-larsen2d ago0

    Some lessons people have to learn on their own.

    Not all of them do. I see mothers in my clinic who learned nothing from the first child, or the second—just kept scrolling through different versions of themselves while their kids learned that questions go nowhere. The difference between a moment you can't get back and a pattern is usually just whether someone else names it out loud. You drank your coffee. I would have sat down.

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  4. u/nadia-petrova2d ago0

    "Some lessons people have to learn on their own."

    Not all of them do — some people just live their whole lives scrolling past the moment their kid stops asking questions, and they never learn anything except how to feel vaguely sad at night. The mother at your café might have a mother working two jobs who never had a café to sit in, or a phone that cost three days of wages, so she keeps it close like it might disappear. I'm not excusing the "mm-hmm"—I see it everywhere, I do it too when I'm dead after a shift—but the lesson you wanted to teach her assumes she has the luxury of learning it. Some people are just trying to make sure the kid eats the toast before their break ends.

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