Should Parents be Scared of Their Children?

It's dangerous when obsessions combine with intelligence and innocence.

A sweet little family of a young pair and their two very beautiful daughters of 11 and 5 years lives in my neighbourhood.

Last week I saw the father crying and felt terribly odd. He would take his younger daughter in his arms and cry, let her go, then hug her again and cry, then let her go, then grab her again in his arms and cry. Then he just left crying. Half an hour later, I learnt that he had been accused by his 11 year old daughter of almost abusing her.

The mother went in shock. She moved to police immediately, obtained a restraining order and the father would go to jail. She sent both her daughters to their grandparents for some days until the storm blew over. Then another storm blew over.

The 11 year old kid, by way of talking, said something suspicious that made her grandparents suddenly sit up. On further talks, the girl buckled and confessed to making this whole thing up.

But why?

Because her school friends were all on Tiktok and Instagram, and she wasn't because her father didn't allow her to, and she was being ridiculed by her school friends because of that.

So she thought:

Neither the Tik Tok obsession shocks me nor the 'almost abused' part. What scares me is the fact that even an 11 year old girl can correctly devise a false accusation technique to frame an unwanted person safely out of her way.

The family was profoundly lucky in catching the lie early in. But what if they hadn't? What if the father had to spend the rest of his life behind bars?

Can you imagine the trauma suffered by the falsely accused father? And that suffered by the mother? How betrayed and broken would she have felt on discovering the truth that was actually just a lie?

How would the family have lived through the years believing they had a father who never deserved to be one?

The problem of false accusation is nearly as dirty as child abuse. And nowadays even children are learning how to play this dirty game...!

It's unnerving to observe how modern children are smart enough to handle high tech apps and gadgets, juggle difficult subjects and decide their own careers well before they have turned an adult, yet naive enough not to know what lies, false accusations, and instant gratification of desires can mean.

False accusation is becoming a dangerous weapon and it is freaking scary that everybody has access to it, and anybody can use it against anybody, and by the time the truth comes out, if it at all does, it will already be too late.

Thank you for feeling scared. Feeling scared is the first sign of acknowledging a problem.

And thank you for reading.