Are You Serving Your Children A Heaping Serving of Toxic Positivity?

Mrs. Anderson’s Handout For Eighth Grade Parents

At the request of the Guidance Counselor, Mrs. Anderson is sending home a handout for parents to help them deal with the Toxic Positivity that their children are accusing them of on TikTok. If you already have a bad attitude, good for you!

4 Ways Parents Can Avoid Toxic Positivity

1. Examine your motives for insisting on positivity from your kids. Are you suppressing your own feelings? Acknowledge your own negative feelings and don’t expect your kids to act them out for you. Maybe it is really YOU who hates homework. Maybe it is really YOU who hates getting up in the morning for the early bus. Maybe it is really YOU who doesn’t want to go to sports practice in the frozen rain at the end of a long day and have to talk to the letchy Coach and eat soggy Doritos for dinner out of a communal bag of cold viruses washed down with the existential angst brewed by meaningless competition on a field washed with toxic pesticides and carcinogenic fertilizer.

2. Imagine failure, pain, loss. Is it really that bad? If not, you are not imagining it right. Perhaps your imaginative capacity for disaster has been curbed by a smug white middle-class life. Go watch a documentary.

3. After you have told your child “everything happens for a reason,” think really hard about what you think that reason is. Is that reason poverty? Is that reason homophobia? Is that reason sexism? Is that reason racism? Is that reason ableism? Is that reason ageism? Is that reason that your child is a spawn of Satan? Apologize to your child and never say that again.

4. Instead of turning that frown upside down, try turning off that smile for a while. Relax in your Resting Bitch Face (or Resting Mitch Face) and let some authentic emotions wash over you. Lock yourself in a closet without a bottle of wine and cry. Picture how great it would be to have a bottle of wine in the closet with you. Imagine pouring the wine into a “Good Vibes Only” mug. Sing to yourself: Glug, glug, glug the sound of wine in a mug. Now pull yourself together and be grateful that you even have a closet. Put your children’s feelings first and be grateful you can allow them to have the childhood you never had. It’s not that hard! Don’t be a whiner. You can do it!

Also Read: Race To Cure Narcissism