kids are mean

10 is too old for that, and I hope the parent had a serious talking to.

However, this reminds me of when my son has just turned 3, we were on a bus and this woman got on and sat down, she was really big, like, sitting with legs apart and stomach almost touching the floor. She was the biggest person I have ever seen, and the biggest person he had ever seen. My son was staring at her and I discreetly distracted him, but he kept looking toward her despite my efforts. Eventually he blurted out, "That lady has a really big belly!" and I quickly shushed him and hoped she hadn't heard because she was far enough away and he didn't yell. The woman did hear, she turned to him and told him, "You're a mean little boy and you owe me an apology!" My son apologized because she told him to, but the look on his face at that moment made me want to get up and kick her face in, he was 3, he didn't understand why it was okay to tell someone they have really long hair, that their hair is super curly, or that they are as tall as his Daddy but it wasn't okay to tell someone they have a fat belly. What he did understand was what it meant to be a mean person, and for someone to call him a mean person really confused and hurt him, demanding he apologize just really sent home that he had done something wrong and he didn't understand what. Luckily our stop came up and we got off, the bus driver said something sympathetic to me, and when we got home I talked to my son about how sometimes people's differences make them feel sad, or bad about themselves and that we shouldn't point them out.

It still bothers me years later. I don't know what I should have done, being a city bus she could have been totally off her nut and I didn't want to engage her based on prior experiences with bus-nut jobs. I would have apologized if I knew she had heard him, but I didn't think she had, the bus is loud, he didn't say it loud, and she was a good distance away looking at something else, and I certainly wasn't going to try to get her attention "just in case she did hear" because if she hadn't, I'd be calling her attention to it.

Kids can be mean, 10 is old enough to know better, and kudos to you for not retaliating (I don't know that I'd be so level headed), but I wanted to add this for people out there that have taken harsh comments from young kids - the little ones don't know what they're saying, they just make observations and if you feel like they said something really hurtful, the proper response is not to yell at them and call them mean, it's to tell them, "It really hurts my feelings when you say that", or ignore it and understand that they're still trying to learn how to be people. It's super hard to teach tact to a toddler and as a parent you can't just shove a sock in their mouths every time you're in public (that's illegal, who knew?) Heck, my son is 5 and today at the grocery checkout he was yelling about having an itch in his butt crack that he couldn't itch and he wanted me to itch it. Yeah.