Sure, President Obama can lead an entire country and all that good stuff, but can he convince screaming children that bees are harmless?

The answer is a resounding no. At the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, Obama was reading Maurice Sendak’s "Where the Wild Things Are" aloud to a group of kids when some bees rudely interrupted the story.

Cue chaos. In Politico’s video below, you can clearly hear children screaming off-screen:

"Oh no, it’s a bee -- that’s OK, guys," Obama said. "Bees are good, they won’t land on you. They won’t sting you, they’ll be OK."

But not even the commander-in-chief can console children who are scared sh-tless of bees. You can hear a young girl shrieking in the background, "It's big and it's scary!"

"Hold on! Hold on!" Obama said as the screams continued. "You guys are wild things! You’re not supposed to be scared of bees when you’re a wild thing!"

TL; DR: Obama was calm AF about the bees.

The kids were definitely NOT calm AF about the bees.

I'm gonna be honest here -- I feel for these kids. I'm 22 and straight-up TERRIFIED of bees. When I was in first grade, I refused to walk home from my bus stop because I was too scared to walk by the bee swarms hovering by the wooden mailboxes on the block. Never mind the fact that these were carpenter bees -- aka the kind that basically never sting you -- they buzzed, and that was more than enough to frighten six-year-old me.

Even today, if I hear the familiar bzz bzz of a fruit fly, I have to double-check that it's not a yellowjacket out to get my soul. (Just picking the cover photo for this story gave me the heebie-jeebies.) I've never been stung, probably because I sprint away at the first sight of flying yellow-and-black blobs. Maybe my phobia would go away if I let myself get stung? Who knows, but I'm certainly not ready to take that step.

The only bee I will never run away from is this cat in a bee costume. I'm guessing the kids from the White House's Easter Egg Roll understand the struggle -- who else is with me?