Lucky - NEVER EVER EVER take credit for this sort of thing. Parenting karma is seriously bad juju. You say “I’ve great at potty training kids, my first trained at 18 months, my second at 13 months - I have a system, if you need help give me a call” and the gods will strike you down by presenting number three, a four year old who pulls poop from his diaper to fingerpaint on the walls. You take credit for your high school kids wonderful grades - and one of them drops out of college to sell juice and pot out of a VW bus going from music festival to music festival. Or maybe you are my dad, who gets three kids he can brag about, until one ends up in and out of rehab in her 30s.
I have one girlfriend and a cousin who both have the same pattern. Two children who were never any trouble - why do people have these naughty children, the parents must be at fault - then the third came along and THEN they understood why that mother was standing over a screaming child in Target - now they were the mother standing over the screaming child in Target making the decision “is this a two minute thing and I can actually get detergent so we have clean underwear tomorrow, or is this a twenty minute thing and we will all be turning the underwear inside out.”
We have one that had a single tantrum - didn’t work and he’s really never pulled it again. He gets cranky sometimes (he’s almost nine now) and a little whiney. And he sulks, but he isn’t expressive in his moods.
His sister arrived expressive in her moods - doesn’t matter if its joy or anger or sadness - she expresses it. In the middle of Barnes and Noble, sure. At seven, she has gotten much better at control, but we’ve removed her from a store or two.
On the logistics of removing a screaming child from a store: sometimes, the tantrumee physically needs to be picked up. And they will kick and flail. In any store or restaurant where there are a lot of people or its crowded, it may be better to stand back and let it happen. We only got ourselves into that situation once - a restaurant too croweded to remove a screaming little girl without risking some getting kicked in the head. I haven’t tried it, but I expect Child Protection Services would get called if I used a straightjacket.
When life was running ideally well with my two, I seldom took them out to places like like this. Groceries were delivered at our house for two years. I’d run to Target when Brainiac4 could watch them or my mother was over. When I did take them places (because you do have to socialize them by removing them from your own home, its part of how they grow up and become real human beings), I’d mood gage them (especially my daughter) and make sure they weren’t going to have low blood sugar induced problems. But I did either misjudge or get myself into a situation twice which involved removing the kids from the store.
I’m lucky, I have a lot of flexibility in my life with my kids. Daycare, so I can drop by Barnes and Noble and pick them up a little late. My mother and mother in law in town, a husband who is involved in raising our children and doesn’t need to be talked into babysitting. Not everyone does.
If you don’t want to be inconvienced by kids, adopt a kid unfriendly schedule yourself. Boarders/B&N are open pretty late and the kiddie crowd clears out after seven (my B&N has a lego table, so it isn’t exactly designed to be a kid free place - this isn’t like taking your kids to rated R movies or restaurants with tableclothes that don’t have chicken fingers on the menu). 12 - 3 tends to be pretty little kid free (though babies are portable and sleep more often) due to napping schedules. The reality of society however is that some parents need to take their kids places (and kids need to go places or they don’t learn how to behave), that kids are uncontrollable to some extent, that kids do not stop crying because you want them to and that even the best parents occationally have a baby that cries in public.
