He should have turned around and told the kid in a calm, reassuring voice: “Hang on son; you’ll get your deserts in a moment.”
That’s ridiculous. What do you think is so hard about picking them up and taking them away? You’re bigger than them. Use that to your advantage.
All parents fail at their responsibility to raise decent little human beings? Do you really believe this? It sounds more like a rationalization; I’m not a tweeker, everyone uses meth socially from time to time.
I’m the same way. I’m always happy to encounter well behaved and polite kids. Yes Sir, No Ma’am goes a long way towards showing respect. That’s not as common these days but just simple courtesy, like saying thank you and please leaves a good impression too.
Correcting bad behavior has to be done at a young age. Helping them to learn basic rules and boundaries. Someone up thread mentioned taking a screaming child out to the car and just letting them cry it out. Eventually the young kid realized what he was doing didn’t work as planned. So he adjusted his own behavior. Such a simple and elegant lesson for a child.
No, but at least some of them are able to teach their children to read and comprehend. Your parents unfortunately…
Actually that’s unfair. You probably just failed to read on this particular occasion. Which is ironic really, as you will realise when you go back and read my post, this time trying harder to do so properly.
These things work OK some of the time and all of us can trot out the cute trite little anecdotes that allow us to smugly believe that time we saw that struggling parent they were a failure.
These tricks don’t work always. Sure Rick, your wife was there so you could just walk out. What if she wasn’t and you absolutely had to do whatever it was you were doing when your kid had the tanty? Not so easy now is it?
And what if your kid doesn’t want to be where you are and wants to be picked up and taken somewhere? So now you are rewarding them by leaving. Oops. How’s your strategy going now, AnaMen?
Trite cute smug little stories and simplifications notwithstanding, as I said, there are basically no parents who haven’t lost control of small children in public. It doesn’t mean they always do or are hopeless parents.
Most observers CAN distinguish between a parent who’s trying to deal with the problem and a “parent” who’s too busy with the precious phone or some such to bother noticing her/his offspring’s antics. The “mother” of the BK tantrum brat was clearly of the latter variety.
Yep. We were at a restaurant about 2 weeks ago and there was a family 2 tables over. The adults were all sitting and talking while the 3 kids were running laps around the dining room, yelling and basically acting like they were in a park.
There is a huge difference in a parent of small kids actively working to teach them proper public behavior and ones that let them do whatever the fuck they want.
Had I been there by myself I would have left the cart and taken him outside. Same result.
Like I said this isn’t rocket surgery.
Some people know how to parent. Others don’t.
From my observation, there’s only one poster in this thread who has a corner on smugness.
Jesus fucking Christ, dopers.
You?
Yup. Sometimes you will do exactly the right thing and the situation is still horrible.
Sometimes, onlookers will regard the necessary and unavoidable mess of your best-practice parenting as tragic failure to parent (even in Rick’s scenario, there will be onlookers tutting and judging as he drags a screaming child to the car for timeout).
There is no universal, simple, perfect, infallible method for anything, in parenting.
My message is basically everyone fails at parenting on occasion. If it isn’t totally clear that this includes me, then it should be. If you think that’s a smug message, well, I think you need to recalibrate your smug-o-meter.
You missed the “absolutely had to do what you were doing” bit.
There are plenty of situations where there is little alternative but to ‘fail’ at parenting. It’s not always possible to drag the misbehaving child out to a quiet place where no bystanders will be impacted - for example, if another, younger child needs feeding; between stops on a crowded train; when buying truly essential items in a supermarket, etc.
First time I went grocery shopping for myself, just out of high school, there was a little kid in the cereal aisle begging his mommy for Cookie Crisp; she kept saying no, you can’t have that cereal, it’s bad for you. So I made a big, exaggerated show of picking out the biggest box of Cookie Crisp, putting it in my cart, and merrily going on my way. True story.
lolwut?
Why not? I don’t know exactly how much Burger King charges for their apple pies, but ~$30 is certainly cheap enough that I could imagine someone paying that to teach a stranger to quit being so bloody annoying, do something nice for a bunch of other strangers and make themselves feel a bit happier.
And see, that sounds to me like a parenting fail, because now I’m thinking about what my grocery cart looks like when I’m doing weekly family shopping, and I’m thinking about how some poor schmuck at the grocery store is going to have to put $100+ of groceries back on shelves, just because I decided that making a point to my kid was more important than not being a huge pain in the ass to that worker.
This. We certainly have a lot of perfect parents who have never had a bad afternoon on the Dope. That’s probably because of their kids’ enormous IQs and early reading skills.
All this talk about “every parent fails at parenting sometimes” etc. is a total red herring in this case. According to the original reddit post:
That’s not a parenting fail, that’s a failure of basic politeness. Even if dragging the kid out of there wasn’t an option in the circumstances, there was no need to snap at the guy like that.