metoo wrote:sauvin wrote:I learned by the time I was ten or so that it was useless (and often worse) to share anything with my parents.
There are hints in the novel that something similar was behind Oskar's silence towards his mum.
Now, I understand that it is very common that bullied kids don't tell their parents. This is a reason why it can keep going on for years.
Why is it that way?
Perhaps kids just don't want to bring home the hell at school. At home the kid can be in a safe haven, be the happy kid. Someone else that the bullied one at school.
Starting to talk about it at home would taint that existence, and that would be unbearable. Better keeping things apart.
About the adults' apparent ignorance:
The movie as well as the novel show things from Oskar's perspective. We are (almost) completely left ignorant about what the adults thoughts might have been - especially regarding Oskar's mother. In that way she is treated rather unfairly, and we shouldn't blame her too quickly.
I think I may have shared in the forum on more than one occasion that I was born without usable hearing in one ear and with 'marked' impairment in the other. I'm much more deaf than hearing. Within a tiny handful of decades before my birth, it was apparently still common practise in that area to shut "feeble-minded" kids away. Feeble-mindedness was apparently shameful to other family members and to the general public, and there was no effective difference between hearing impairment and actual "mental retardation".
Shutting away feebs might (apparently) have been no longer commonly practised in my area, but hearing impairment wasn't well understood while I was growing up. It was, in fact, not understood at
all. The only hasard my parents saw implicit in not being able to hear was in crossing the street: I was admonished sternly and often never to ride my bicycle on the street, and to look both ways twice when crossing it.
If you can imagine going to school where *everybody* speaks some really weird and obscure dialect of Hungarian, where nobody has the patience or the interest to teach you the language and where you don't even have the
ability to learn (you can't learn what you can't hear), then you can probably imagine that I'd gone home more than once with clothes torn and face bloodied. After this happened more than a couple of times, they seemed to have pretty much decided that I was doing or saying something wrong to invite this kind of unwanted attention, and that I needed to figure it out. They became ever more exasperated as we moved around to different parts of town, and me attending different schools and still somehow managing to have precisely the same problems.
I think I was still in the fifth grade - ten years old, maybe eleven - when I taught myself how to make a noose. My parents never knew
that, either, because by that time, I'd given up trying to explain a problem I didn't understand myself. I can't even begin to tell you how tired I got of them just throwing up their hands and saying "I don't understand why you're having so many problems - none of the other kids are having any problems figuring out how to get along with people!"
I don't think kids Oskar's age worry too much about bringing too much hell home. I suspect it's more likely they're not much inclined to make a hellish home life worse.