Henceforth, I will give every parent I see who keeps their kid on a leash a huge thumbs-up.
Of course we all weren’t perfect angels, and when we weren’t it was our parent’s responsibility to get us under control or remove us from the situation. I can look back and think of a half-dozen situations where I probably would have told my mom off for letting my brother pull leaves off the potted plants in Shoney’s, or rub ice cream all over the slide at McDonald’s. She’d been dealing with us all day, and was worn out, and let us do whatever because she didn’t feel like disciplining us anymore. Newsflash: that’s not okay. You being tired, you being in a hurry, doesn’t make it okay to let your kids run amok. Just because we all did these things as a child doesn’t mean we can say it’s ok for kids to keep on doing them, because we know better.
So you think that the appropriate response to this is to make parents have to start their grocery shopping over because you can’t bear a crying child for 60 seconds? It is our responsibility to be inconvenienced to the tune of 20 minutes to an hour so you won’t be for two minutes? And then it’s not an excuse if we are too tired to discipline them after all that?
Most of you are saying that people who hate children are bad people, so I don’t really feel sorry for you. If a person is visibly making an effort to quiet the child or remove it, good. If they are standing there while Jenny throws a screamy hissy fit in the floor, not good.
ETA: no, that’s not an excuse. You don’t get to let your kid scream and run around because you’ve had a hard day.
This is your brain, with children.
Oh yes we do! Especially if it really annoys the inflexible and anxiety-ridden. If you don’t like it, move to aisle 12.
Well I imagine people who are anxiety-ridden recognize this and take their medication, and give kids a pass because they know they are more susceptible to the noise than average people. If I don’t like your kid screaming, I’ll stand there and tell you about it.
Where is the OP, anyway? Isn’t he the one who is supposed to be bitching at me for hating kids? I’ve given him plenty of ammunition so far!
Yeah, but see…it doesn’t matter if you don’t like it. And a mother with a screaming toddler couldn’t give a flying fuck what you think about her crying toddler. Seriously. You have no rights in this scenario. There is no expectation of peace and quiet in the grocery store. You can shop late at night. There are rarely children in the store after 10pm.
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love
chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” - Socrates?
“I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words… When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint” (Hesiod, 8th century BC).
It’s tradition. Kids act like kids, and old farts bitch about it.
But like I said way way earlier, in a restaurant, you better change your kid’s fucking diaper. I don’t wanna smell that shit while I’m eating. That’s YOUR fault, not the baby’s.
This is a crock of shit. Half of all pregnancies in the US are unintended - that’s in and out of marriage combined. People’s mistakes should not be rewarded. And “supported by all”? Please. We’re not a collectivist society. Get off your high horse. My parents are both physicians and their entrance into medical school wasn’t because they’re altruistic people - incidentally (and incredibly) they are, but they acknowledge they’re in the minority. They are physicians only because they had stellar MCAT’s and GPA’s.
Actually, most of my comments on bad parenting are drawn from experiences I’ve had with relatives and neighbors, not one-off events*. My family lived on the Air Force base until my daughter was in the second or third grade, and so I saw how the neighbors raised their kids, or let them run wild, as the case may be, in many different settings. I saw them at school, in the playground, at the commissary, at the base exchange (which any other branch of the service would call the post exchange), at the base movie theater, at the clinic waiting room, etc.** I also talked to the parents quite a lot, whether I would have chosen them as friends or not, because they were THERE. I learned about their child-raising philosophies. My daughter played with their kids, either in my house or yard or in theirs. I saw the results of their parenting, or not parenting, as the case may be. When I was a teenager, I did my share and then some of babysitting. When I was eight, my mother was deathly ill, and I did a lot of adult-type chores, including helping to keep my younger sister and infant brother occupied and fed and clean. Despite having only one child of my own flesh and blood, I am an EXPERIENCED parent, and I’ve dealt with many kids, with many different personalities. Yes, I really lucked out in the genetic draw, as my daughter was and is a very pleasant person, not much given to throwing tantrums. She’s thrown a few, like anyone, but for the most part she’s pretty likable. However, even though I was lucky, I still had to teach her not to touch stuff in a store, and to generally behave herself. It’s not a natural thing for a child, and anyone who takes a child out in public should be prepared to control that child.
*Thankfully, the boy who wanted some of my cake was a single instance. And I continue to think, to this very day, that Auntie was his guardian, but that she didn’t really want to be bothered with keeping him under control.
**In some ways, living on base is like living in a very small town. This is good and bad. The base was very, very secure for kids, so that everyone could let their kids run all over the open areas of the base. Of course, some areas were off limits to everyone except those who worked there. The areas that were child-friendly, though, were very child-friendly, and most people who live on base love kids. I was pleasant at the very least to all the kids, and downright friendly to my daughter’s friends. I played with them occasionally, and asked them if they wanted to call their parents to get permission to stay for dinner. The base was also a hotbed of gossip and feuds and the worst of small-town culture.
This bothers me too. And I see parents (or those I assume to be parents) doing it most of all. I see adults out in a group. Baby is in one of those SUV child carriers, you know what I’m talking about, it’s too big to fit in an adult chair. Baby gets his bottle while he’s in the carrier, nobody is holding Baby while he eats. Baby seems to be pretty well used to not having human contact. I am, of course, a breastfeeding Nazi, having nursed my own daughter for over a year. I firmly believe that babies need to be held while they’re nursing, whether it’s from breasts or from a bottle. I think that kids, and babies in particular, should be picked up and cuddled every now and then when they’re awake. I think that they shouldn’t be parked in a baby seat for hours on end, especially when there’s a group of a half dozen adults sitting around. I think that the adults should pick up Baby, feed him, cuddle him, and pass him around to the other adults, and not ignore him during the whole restaurant visit. I put my daughter in a baby seat when she was an infant and toddler, but she didn’t spend the vast majority of her time in it. I held her and loved her and then passed her over to her Daddy, who also held her and loved her. Babies and kids NEED a lot of contact and interaction. Ignoring them isn’t good for them or for other people around them.
But of course I’m pretty judgmental like that.
I have the right to bitch and tell you what an inconsiderate, terrible parent you are. Free society, right?
Okay, I found this by searching for “cult of the child.” (Minus “of the,” natch.) Two quiet, well-behaved children in a restaurant. OP was still uncomfortable, because to him, all children are ticking time bombs, and you have to watch them all through your meal, and when nothing happens, it’s obvious that they were only quiet and well-behaved because their parents were paying attention to them. So the parents still fail.
Ooooohhhh Village of the Damned. They were silently doing “that mind control thing”. OP was the only person in the world who could detect it. Just like in the movies. :eek:
Yeah, but that doesn’t stop the child from screaming, so you really haven’t gained anything.
So having children gives you the magical ability to count?
Der Trihs in another thread today claimed that a person with kids consumes more than one without.
Ok, that is a bit over the top. I mean, I hate them because they’re kids, but they’re quiet so they wouldn’t attract my attention. The OP is complaning over this?
Perhaps your kid was a paragon and others were rapscallions. That can happen. My kid is well-behaved as well, and I work on it with a self-concious course of discipline. I am not however perfect, and neither is he.
However, we are not discussing (or at least I was not discussing) the informed judgments made based on years of observation in the closed confines of an army base, but the “OMG that kid is throwing a tantrum in the shopping mall!” thing.
Perhaps all of your judgments of others are well-considered. I can’t possibly say. But please permit me to doubt that all of everyone’s judgments of others as expressed in this thread and elsewhere are equally well-considered, and never based on wishful thinking concerning their own (or their children’s) good behaviour compared with other peoples’.
Moreover, as you say you are an “experienced parent”, and so naturally you would expect more deference paid to your judgment of others’ parenting abilities, right?
I didn’t say anything resembling that.
Then we have no disagreement.
I agree that it’s not ok, but I also recognize that people don’t operate at peak efficiency when exhausted.