What teasing might be teaching our kids

At a local dinosaur park I witnessed a father scaring his two young kids and then laughing at them saying “ha ha, you were scared” in the same way as you would expect children in the schoolyard to do when they tease one another. And then it struck me - are we inadvertently teaching our kids to tease one another and in more extreme cases bully one another by our own interactions with them? I had always thought that the meanness and teasing that was present at school was just how kids are but now I suspect that we are actually teaching this kind of behaviour to our kids. This dad was clearly just playing around and didn't mean anything by his actions but he failed to realise that this was the behaviour he was modeling to his kids - it's ok to tease others, to scare them and to laugh at them. These kids didn't seem hurt by their dad's jibes but the problem is that they learn these interactions and replicate them with others who may feel hurt by them and in situations which may not be appropriate.

The other problem I have with this man’s teasing is that he was shaming his kids for having a perfectly normal and natural emotion - fear. He was not so subtly teaching them that it is not ok to feel fear, that it's something to be humiliated for. I sadly see this a lot at this dinosaur park - parents saying things to their children like “don't be such a wuss” and “you're always so scaredy”. You might as well be whispering in their ears “it's not ok to feel scared, you shouldn't feel scared, there's something wrong with you if you do feel scared.” When you invalidate a child's feelings they're going to naturally turn to experiencial avoidance - they will try to not feel those feelings that they have been told not to feel. In ACT’s view this experiencial avoidance can lead to greater suffering - for example, maybe they refuse invitations to sleepovers because they don't want their friends to know they're afraid of the dark leading to feelings of isolation and perhaps thoughts of “nobody likes me anyway” which could lead to further avoidance of other social situations and further unhappiness. Once learned, experiencial avoidance can be a hard habit to break so maybe we should try to keep our children's minds open about experiencing painful emotions. It's ok to feel these feelings, it is normal to feel these feelings, they may feel big right now but they can never get bigger than you, you can contain them and they will pass like clouds in the sky.