Why do colleagues talk to each other like children?
Some educators and presenters carry over classroom habits, addressing adult colleagues with condescending tones, elementary phrasing like "friends," or unwarranted corrections. This constant infantilization feels insulting to experienced staff with advanced degrees and drives people away from their schools.
Core Friction Pattern
Analysis of 4 peer accounts across online developer and community forums reveals that “Why do colleagues talk to each other like children?” repeatedly surfaces due to edge-case mismatches between standard defaults and real-world environments. Standard troubleshooting frequently falls short, compelling practitioners to develop custom workarounds.
+3 alternative community-tested workarounds cataloged below.
What the numbers show
Counted from the threads quoted below. How we count
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
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Why do colleagues talk to each other like children?
- 1Inching away towards the door while giving brief noncommittal responsesDid this help you?
- 2Using sarcasm or joking remarks to push back on condescending languageDid this help you?
- 3Ignoring them or utilizing union representationDid this help you?
- 4Leaving the school or quitting due to administrative frictionDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Might be my biggest pet peeve. It’s 7 AM, and I’m at the copier, and I’m extremely stressed from an elder care crisis I’m managing outside of school. Anyway, one of the math teachers walks right up to me and launches into a monologue about technical IEP jargon and clearly can’t read that I’m not interested as I’m only saying “uh huh, uh huh” as I’m inching towards the door. And then she points out I put a date in wrong and ends with “well then fix that.” And it’s like…..um….I don’t remember getting an announcement that you had been promoted to admin, so maybe worry about proofreading your own entries (which she definitely needs to do), and secondly, I’m not a 15 year old who didn’t do his homework. Check your tone”source ↗
“I was in a PD this week and one of the presenters kept referring to the group of us as "friends." As in "Friends, remember that..." "OK Friends, now we're going to..." She was a lovely person and otherwise it was actually a really good PD, but I hated that little quirk.”source ↗
“Amongst the many things she did wrong that year, one of the worst was that she talked to all the staff in the same way she talked to her former 4th grade students. It just really rubbed every adult the wrong way; it felt really insulting. Nearly half the staff left at the end of the year.”source ↗
“I'm in elementary and our principal treats us this way. It's so insulting; I have a master's degree and far more experience in the classroom than said principal.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 4Why do coworkers snitch to management over petty things?
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- 4Coworkers spreading rumors about HR visits
- 5Why do teachers keep getting mistaken for students?
- 3Why do things I say to my pets sound so weird out of context?
- 5How to stop being too overbearing in my child's relationships