It can be tough to have smart parents. My father studied organic chemistry, and when it came time for me to study it in high school, I thought he’d be able to help me out. I was wrong. When I didn’t understand a concept, my father would grow frustrated, exasperated, and even straight-up aggressive. It made me feel like he thought I was stupid, and was absolutely counter-productive. He never tried to help me with chemistry again.
While it may be frustrating to help your kid understand concepts that come naturally to you, that’s kind of an important part of parenting. But some people can’t seem to follow through. Such is the case in a recent r/AmItheAsshole thread (which has since been deleted), where a developer came to seek validation for his seriously questionable parenting skills.
In the post, which ended up going viral on Twitter, the developer explains that his daughter decided she wanted to learn how to code. When he told her he didn’t have the time to teach her (red flag), she decided to try to learn on her own. And when she asked her father to review the code of her game, he wasn’t very supportive. In fact, he went as far as to tell her that it sucked.
After she cried and threw a tantrum, and his wife expressed that he should have lied and explained how to make it better, he decided to come to Reddit for some guidance. The response on Reddit, as well as on Twitter, was not in his favor. And nobody’s less surprised than us. We’re not coding experts, so seeing people on Twitter give his kid props for learning C++ (a difficult feat) was both enlightening and heartwarming. Hopefully, Dad saw the response before the thread was deleted. He can and needs to do better.
