“Whining” is a strange concept to me. When a parent says, “Stop whining!” I imagine them blaming their child for a feeling of their own – annoyance, anger, maybe guilt. When parents say “Stop whining!” I see a child experiencing a parental failure of empathy.
I imagine the whining child saying, “I hurt! I’m suffering!” I imagine the child frustrated by their parent’s refusal (?) or inability (?) to attend to what the child perceives as a need and what the parent (perhaps correctly) interprets as a want. I hear, “I’m sad, I’m angry, I’m powerless,” and maybe, “I’m afraid.”
When a parent says, “Stop whining!” I imagine them discrediting the child’s emotional experience, disavowing the painful realities that a) they’ve decided to deprive the child, to deny the child, to frustrate the child, and b) this deprivation, denial, frustration, results in distress, and c) the child’s expression of distress at inconveniences, and at worst, enrages, the parent.
I like to imagine the parent saying, instead, “I understand you really want ‘x,’ and I know my refusal hurts you. I’m saying ‘no’ for reasons that make sense to me, but I know that doesn’t make you feel any better.” And maybe, “Later, when you are feeling less upset, we can talk about how to express your feelings in situations like this in ways that make it easier for me to hear you, that increase the likelihood of an outcome less disappointing to you!”
AI note: I used ChatGPT and Dall-E to generate the image that accompanies the post, by asking, first, for an image of a whiny toddler, and then, repeatedly asking that the toddler be made whinier. The final prompt, generated by ChatGPT in response to this dialogue and resulting in the image I used, was “A toddler in the midst of an extraordinary tantrum, about two years old, with a wildly exaggerated expression of ultimate distress. The child’s tears are oversized, streaming down a dramatically red face, and the mouth is open in an enormous wail. The arms are flailing wildly, and the body is contorted in an extreme pose of frustration. The toddler wears a bright, simple outfit. The background is a living room in disarray, with toys everywhere and a couch in the background. This scene is the epitome of a toddler experiencing a highly exaggerated, incredibly whiny moment.”
Midjourney, fed the same prompt, responded with these:
Apparently, all children are white.
