And if you have an excuse why you arent the asshole you appear to be, you don’t take it personally and explain why you arent if you are feeling defensive.
And in the vast majority of these cases, the excuses are either lame or non-existent IMO.
Or are we supposed to go around assuming all bad behaviours have a valid excuse?
Well, my point was more that we shouldn’t assume at all, but Wile E’s right. More capsaicin, less arguing.
Yes but humans react according to statistical norms and should be expected and dare I say allowed to do so. According to you if I see a toddler running around with his clothes on fire, I ought to ignore it since maybe his dad is a stunt man and he’s giving junior lessons that I just happened to stumble upon.
Get real. The people who bitched about your kid meant well, since they felt quite reasonably that your kid was acting up and not in a medical condition. 99 out of a hundred reasonable people would have spoken up. And those 99 out of a 100 would have felt terrible and apologized when you explained the situation.
I’d hate to think our society is going to be forced into a state of inaction in public because just possibly, we might be reading the situation incorrectly.
The hubby and I were at a family picnic. We were hanging near a table with finger foods, as was the 3 yr old kid of his cousin. Kid is generally a very well behaved and polite little boy. There was a small container of salsa and some tortilla chips. We sat and watched as the kid would pick up a chip, dip it in the salsa, lick the salsa off and then re-dip the chip. We (as we are childless) found this very amusing. After the kid toddled off to find something else to do, we did ask that the salsa be replaced and told the host why.
We got berated by the kids grandma (not the one we are related to, the other one) for watching him do it and letting him behave like at. She caused quite a scene. We were left scratching our heads as to why someone would get so upset by a 3 year old acting like a kid. No one else ate the salsa, the kid did nothing too unhygienic, it’s not like we let him eat boogers. After we left, we got a note of apology from hubby’s cousin stating that she didn’t think our behavior was out of line and her mother in law is a bitch.
Follow the thread, and you’ll see that I didn’t. Someone else made a point of telling me it wasn’t okay. I simply counterasserted. That’s not “making a point” to tell anyone anything.
I don’t even want the upside that you just mentioned. I don’t want either of these things. I could care less whether you guys believe me or not, as my posts so far should pretty well indicate.
I am bothering to counterassert, just in hopes of jogging in people the realization that they’re making a lot of unjustified assumptions. That would be nice, if people realized that in general. But your opinion of my parenting is the furthest thing from my mind in any of this.
Excepting the arm-grab, it would appear that Angry Waiting Room Guy made precisely the right call. Had he done the “right thing” and addressed his complaint to the father, he’d have been told that it was perfectly acceptable for Frylock’s child to annoy him, just because it is, no reason necessary. And then **Frylock **would’ve had his nose broken, and wouldn’t that be a worse outcome overall?
Don’t be ridiculous. There’s a huge difference between ignoring a dangerous situation and taking it upon yourself to comment on someone’s behavior. All I was saying is that there are circumstances that may go beyond what you observe. Believe me, I have dragged my kids out of places if I felt they were being disruptive. I can count on one hand the number of times it has happened, but I freely acknowledge that my kid started acting bratty in Learning Express last year not because he had anything else going on but because he wanted a certain toy and I said no.
Do you think you’re funny? Or that your sarcasm is conducive to healthy discussion and decent conversation?
You may assert that the moon is made of green cheese or whatever it is you like to assert. It does not make it the truth.
You guys are even better at making up stories than I am!
For the record, the response from me would have been an apology and an immediate action taken to cease the jumping behavior.
Within this thread? About burning toddler’s eyes out with hot sauce? Really?
Without sarcasm:
It is irrelevant to me what anyone here thinks about whether or not I’m a good parent.
I’d like to just leave it at that, but people keep insisting on demanding explanations, and indeed, making up stories in order to “support” actual assertions that I’m not a good parent. I’m not sure how to make my point about the irrelevance of your opinions without either simply repeating the above, or else by using sarcasm to get you to discover the irrelevance of your opinion for yourself. Any sustained logical argument over the matter would presume I do care about your opinion–and my very point is that I don’t and shouldn’t. There’s the correlated point that you guys are making a great number of false statements based on unjustified assumptions, and I’ve been trying to get you to see that as well, though as I said above, I haven’t been as logical and step by step about it as I might have been in another forum. It’s hard to discuss that matter, anyway, without slipping into a discussion of my own parenting skills–which is exactly the discussion I want to avoid because A) I don’t care what you think, and B) no one ever wins those discussions at the SDMB.
Why, if she was doing nothing wrong?
Wow, this started out as a funny thread, but now everyone’s pissy. It’s like someone took Tabasco from a toddler!
Who said (he) wasn’t?
Just…
look.
It isn’t going to happen, okay?
No matter how desperately you want to get more information about this, no matter how much you want an explanation, you’re not going to get one. Is this killing you inside? Then I am sorry. But it’s not going to happen.
I’ll keep responding to this thread as long as anyone wants me to, but what you won’t get is an explanation. I simply refuse to give one, on principle.
I never, ever comment on others’ parenting, and I never, ever give an account of my own if there is any justificatory intent to the account whatsoever. I do not believe this is a topic that ever yields healthy discussion, except possibly in the most clinical and professional of settings. Therefore, on principle, I do not participate in those discussions.*
Certainly not going to start now–especially since I care so little about what anyone on the SDMB thinks of my parenting choices and techniques.
*Oh dammit, now someone’s going to go find threads where I break this rule or something. Who knows, maybe I have, though I don’t think I have. Anyway, I’m voicing my ideals for you here, and admit it’s possible I’ve fallen off the wagon sometimes.
Not particularly, but it is mildly amusing watching you squirm and equivocate, and I consider it a public service to periodically remind the board at large what an annoyingly pretentious twat you are.
Thanks for your willingness to help.
Heh 
And I bet some of these folks drive PT Cruisers too…
I am squirming, you’re right. (Trying to figure out how to communicate my point without falling into the trap of trying to justify myself.)
Equivocating? That’s a term with a specific meaning, and I’d like to see you find the instance of equivocation in my posts.
The stuff about me being annoying or pretentious, I had no idea there was anyone who even paid enough attention to me to have an opinion about me, much less have that opinion, so… I’ll have to let that one mull for a bit in my brain.
So anyway. I also liked hot foods and hot sauce as a child, and my parents certainly didn’t keep an eye on me every second. Still, it pays to be careful.
The OP reminds me of a story my aunt tells me which I like to share. When i was about 2-3 years old, I lived with her in India. The way things worked then, is they lived in a flat with several floors and several apartments.
My aunt was having the neighbor lady visit one day. I had toddled off somewhere. No one really worried in those days, but after a bit they came looking for me.
They all left their doors open (the heat) so i had wandered into the neighbor lady’s house. She had cooked dinner for her husband, which happened to be creamed spiced turnip, which I loved*, and I had taken the pot off the stove - remember, no ovens, so these stoves were only about a foot off the ground - and proceeded to eat this, my favorite vegetable.
Remember, it’s creamed. And I’m 2. Maybe 3. So I am eating it with my hands. So I have it on my hands, my face, my hair. My clothes all have it. It’s spicy, so my eyes are watering. But I am eating it with every bit of enjoyment.
And this is her husband’s dinner! He was coming home soon! But the neighbor lady just laughed and laughed.
Kids can get into things really fast.
*It really can be good if prepared right. No one around here really knows how to make turnip really good to eat. I can make it mouth-wateringly good.
So, I talked to the host. These people were friend-of-friends type thing, and he doesn’t know them that well. He’s found out since yesterday that the husband has a bit of a rep for being a yelly douchebag when he starts drinking.
Have you ever gotten that stuff in your eyes? Look, I put tobasco on everything, and if I accidentally touched the top of an unopened bottle, I would wash my hands, just to avoid accidentally rubbing my eyes later and getting the stuff in my eyes. And we’re talking about a toddler who was in that stage where they walk around like they’re sort of drunk. I just don’t think that’s old enough to be handling something like tobasco sauce unsupervised. Of course, if it gets in her eyes, it’s not the end of the world or anything, but I can’t see why you would risk it at a party where getting it in her eyes is liable to make things unpleasant for your kid, you and everyone in the vicinity.
And I did look around for the parents before I talked to her, and I didn’t see them anywhere nearby. They only came over when they heard her shrieking (and she was loud, and I guess they recognized her shriek).
This post cracks me up. You’re doing virtually the same thing the OP was pitting: making a value judgment about someone without knowing the whole story. The really funny part is that you’ll probably argue with me about how this is totally different.