A mother-of-two has revealed the “creepy” comments strangers often make to her young son that she never heard with her daughter.
Alysse Gilbert, from the United States, said that when her little boy smiles at someone in public, they say he is “flirting” with them.
She said no one ever said the same thing when her daughter was a baby and she found the comment “weird.”
“No, he’s actually just a happy kid,” she said.
Some parents saw no harm in the remark, but many moms agreed with Alysse saying they had experienced the same comment that made them “uncomfortable.”
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Alysse Gilbert, from the US, said she found it odd that her little boy smiled at someone in public and they said he was “flirting” with them.
“Can we talk about the weirdest comment I get now that I have a son that I never had with my daughter?” Alysse said in a video.
“Whenever I’m out in public and I have my son with me, if he smiles vaguely at a stranger, I swear the comment I get is ‘He’s so flirtatious,’ ‘He’s flirting with me.’
“And I’m like Diane, you’re almost 65 and he’s a baby, he’s not flirting with you, that’s weird to me, does anyone else find that comment so weird?”
Hundreds of moms quickly agreed with Alysse, saying their children, both boys and girls, had received the same comment.
“YES, that’s a disgusting comment,” one parent responded and a second said: “It makes me feel free, so uncomfortable.”
“I get this comment with my daughter and it makes me go from 0 to 100. I say ‘no, she’s FRIENDLY,'” a third wrote.
“I have happy twins. And people say it’s ALL the time. Why do we sexualize a smile and happy children? » someone asked.
Others shared similar comments about their babies, including calling them “heartbreakers.”
‘Or ‘oh my God, that smile.’ He’s going to cause trouble,” one mom added.
However, some did not dispute the “harmless” statement.
“I think ‘flirting’ can mean playfully teasing or trying to get attention by being cute without sexual connotations,” one parent explained.
“I use the word flirt in the sense of ‘they’re trying to dazzle you.’ My children always try to dazzle everyone with smiles. I say they’re flirting, but no one thinks I’m trying to marry them,” said another.
“I feel like flirting can be used as a platonic term and doesn’t always indicate sexual attraction. I know it can be weird sometimes, but I don’t think it’s always meant in a weird way .”
