“Divided Over a Prank: Dad Sparks Fury Online After Wife’s Unforgiving Reaction”
Many people hate practical jokes, usually not without a reason
Image credits: choreograph / envatoelements (not the actual photo)
This dad got into a huge fight with his wife after pranking his 9-year-old son
Image credits: nd3000 / envatoelements (not the actual photo)
Image credits: Small-Elephant9195
Parents should provide their children with support, not with a traumatizing event to recover from
Image credits: Vlada Karpovich / pexels (not the actual photo)
Discussing the occurrence with Bored Panda, Dr. Roberta Michnick Golinkoff emphasized that the child did not need to expend all his energy and emotion on recovering from the prank. “Parents are there to support their kids and not to increase their fears and trauma. I repeat: Parents are protectors not torturers. And anyone who says, ‘Oh, that kid will recover’ fails to see the depth of that child’s reaction and how he will be afraid for longer than he needs to be when he enters an empty or dark room,” the expert said.
Whether or not parents find pranking kids funny, the latter most likely don’t. “Not only are they not able to cognitively understand the humour, but they’re also the butt of a joke. And there’s a violation of trust,” developmental psychologist at York St John University and expert in how children develop humor, Paige Davis pointed out in a piece for BBC, discussing the mixed feelings pranks evoke in children.
Another expert, a child psychotherapist and spokesperson for the Association of Child Psychotherapists (ACP) in the UK, Rachel Melville-Thomas, added that pranking your offspring might not necessarily make them hyper-vigilant, but it can result in them thinking that the parent can do it again, because of the way our brains are wired.
