You can do that without getting personal, is all I’m saying.
Well, a protracted lecture in a shrill tone IS a bit over the line, but we did not KNOW that that is what actually happened, because what you posted originally is this:
It’s not clear from that statement that it was a “protracted lecture delivered in a shrill tone”. For all we know “a don’t talk to your mother that way” could have very well consisted of “you know, that’s not a nice way to to talk to you mother, please stop”.
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No, but calling them on their misbehaviour doesn’t mean that that’s what a person thinks. Lkely it merely means “stop misbehaving”.
I don’t think anyone is ragging on you for your long ago behaviour, more on the attitude of mom’s who don’t themselves take care of misbehaviour of their own children.
Well, my mom did tell me it was a “protracted lecture delivered in a shrill tone”. I didn’t include that in the post that started this because I posted it on the fly and didn’t realize I’d have to defend it. I should also mention that my 7 y/o version of “having a fit” consisted of crying and arguing. NOT running around, hitting anyone, throwing things or lying on the floor kicking and pounding. IOW, no damage or potential damage to merchandise. (And I did say “lecture”, even if I didn’t say “protracted”.)
Yeah, but…I have a co-worker right now who has apparently become god since someone died. He doesn’t just say “Stop that”, he says, “Who raised you—wolves?” or “Is this what your house looks like?” or “You want me to use this on you? [shows wooden spoon]”. I’ve spoken to the manager about this, and he’s been warned, but he’s been here since the earth cooled, so it’s unlikely that he’ll be fired, unless a customer lodges a serious complaint. So I’m a bit touchy about people going over the line and making it personal instead of leaving it at “Stop that.”
My rule of thumb is, I don’t say anything to a kid that I wouldn’t say to an adult. I’m not trying to mold their psyches; that’s for their parents to do. As long as they get off the beds and don’t fool with the breakables, that’s as far as my authority goes.
Well, okay! But when I spoke to the manager, we did agree that if a kid doesn’t respond to me, the best course of action is to tell their parents to rein them in, not to escalate. (Or to call security if they’re unattended; I did have to do that once.)
Can’t we all just get along? 
I wanna hear more stories about Empresses of the World!
What Baker said!
Among other things, you folks are making me glad I don’t work in retail or tourism anymore!
CJ
I’m not sure if this woman counts, but I’ll tell the story anyway.
The Scene: The Stroller Shop, at the Disneyland Main Gate.
The Players: SisterCoyote, the only Cast Member on-site (lucky me)
The Mother ™
The Crying Kid (TCK)
The time is approximately 3:30 in the afternoon, which is why I was alone at the shop. We didn’t get a lot of stroller returns or rentals from noon to about four-thirty. TM walks up to me, with TCK in tow, and hands me her receipt. Now, this kid is somewhere in the four to six range, and she is tired. I can hear it in her cry (one thing about working at Disneyland - you learn the difference between a tired cry, an injured cry, and a pissed-off cry without ever needing to have kids of your own). TCK is also telling TM that she doesn’t feel well.
Being conscientious of the fact that this child needs, at the very least, to go lay down somewhere, I am rushing as quickly as I can to refund TM’s stroller deposit. I hand over the five dollars, expecting her to take her suffering child and leave. Instead, TM stops to ogle the souvenirs we have around the front of the stand, ignoring TCK completely as far as I can tell.
Well, TCK finally cries herself sick, and pukes. At which point TM looks up at me and says, “Well, you’ll have to do something now.”
Internally, I’m thinking WTF? Externally, I smiled at her, walked over to the phone and called custodial to handle the code V before getting a bag of “pixie dust” (scented sawdust) to dump over the, um, spill.
Seriously. What was I supposed to do before that to prevent the situation?
Code cleanup on aisle 2, please.
indeed. And I’d say that counts!
Meanwhile, I hope no one minds if I clarify my position a bit. I talked to my mom again and asked her for details of this “protracted lecture in a shrill voice”. She replied, “Oh, she just went on and on, and when she started with the ‘There are little children in Africa who don’t have books’, that’s when I held the book up and said, ‘Just ring this up, please.’.” Because that’s one of her pet peeves; when she was a kid it was The Little Children In Europe, so she would choke down her mashed turnips or whatever, all the while thinking, “I bet they wouldn’t eat this either.” She gives money to charities, but has never understood the “Clean your plate or people on the other side of the world will die” logic.
I also asked her about the surrounding circumstances, and she said that I’d been well-behaved up to that point, and that the bookstore visit was at the end of the day (because she loves books too, and wouldn’t have stopped at a bookstore if she couldn’t make it a long visit), so I’d probably hit my saturation point by that time. It’s a simple matter of, books mean a LOT to me (duh; I’m a Doper!) so my reaction was naturally different.
“No, you can’t have ice cream.”
“Okay.”
“No, we can’t stop and feed the ducks.”
“Okay.”
“No, you can’t have that book.”
“WHAT?! Why? Why can’t I have it? You said I could have something, and I want THIS!!” And so forth.
And the reason I invoked the roast beef/slapping thread was because I thought the two incidents were similar, in that both strangers jumped to the conclusion that someone else’s kid, a total stranger, needed a complete attitude adjustment. As you can see in the OP of the other thread, roast beef was just one of the options on the…table, so to speak. The eight year old girl (not ten, as I mistakenly reported) wasn’t pitching a fit, and hadn’t been told “Roast beef or nothing”. She was just making her preference known. And yet the slapping woman, based on the one sentence she overheard (read the OP; she couldn’t have overheard the entire convo) figured she knew allllllllll about this kid, and had to intervene right then and there.
I’m not claiming that the “little children in Africa” statement is perfectly analagous to slapping. But I think the circumstances are similiar, in that the bookstore clerk went beyond “Stop making a scene” and on into “How dare you ask for a book!” She knew nothing about me, beyond the fact that I was getting loud right then, but she took it upon herself to deliver, or try to, a Life Lesson. Her objective should have been to get me to be quiet and that’s it.
I’ve seen many posters, here and elsewhere, relate anecdotes of telling other people’s kids to pipe down, stop running, whatever. That’s okay, and not what I’m talking about. It’s the overall attitude adjustment attempts, like with my co-worker, that I object to. Stick to the things that affect you right then, and leave the character-shaping lectures to people who actually know the family.
When I was a kid, I always said, “Well, send it to them!” to that “kids in Africa are starving” lecture.
I now have a theory that the “clean your plate or feel guilty” meme is partially to blame for the obesity epidemic.
Anne, I agree with you. I still have a problem not completing all food on my plate, three-plus decades later. However, had I ever uttered that line to my parents or grandparents, I would not be here, typing this post today.
I always used to get, “It’s a sin to waste food!” It was especially bad in elementary school. Our teachers, the lunch ladies, etc would hound six-year olds to finish these huge slabs of pizza, and drink all of our milk, no matter how full we were.
We also used to get a lot of guilt because this was during the great famine in Ethiopia and Sister would ALWAYS drag out the poor starving Africans, and how wicked and sinful we were to dump our milk out.
All it’s going to take is one parent to call the cops when he uses that wooden spoon line and maybe your manager will take it seriously. And if he had used that line on one of my kids, the cops definitely would have been called.
There’s giving someone else’s child The Look, there’s asking them to please stop making so much noise, there’s a lot of ways you can politely intervene when someone else’s child is being a brat in public. But there’s a line that only family members can cross, and beyond that it can cause a rapid escalation from just the child throwing a fit to the parent throwing one as well. And/or the authorities intervening.
When I was a child, all the starving children were in China. Apparently, they’ve all moved to Africa since then. 
I don’t remember parents making me finish everything on my plate; they just didn’t give me a lot of food. I could certainly have more if I wanted it, but they never heaped my plate full of food. I was required to eat my veggies and try new things, though. If something new was offered, I think two bites was the minimum. And we often had fruit for dessert.
When I ate dinner at a certain friend’s house, though, plates were piled high. And there was no dessert unless you were a member of the “Clean Plate Club.” And they always had ‘weird’ veggies like turnips and squash and brussels sprouts. Bleeeech.
The Roman Catholic Church calls seven years old “the age of reason,” at which you are old enough to understand the consequences of your actions. If you are old enough to go to Hell for what you do you’re plenty old enough to to be told to shut up by total strangers. She was being relatively kind and gentle.
True, which was why the clerk thought you had potential to learn a lesson. Apparently, you learned the wrong one.
Outer Mongolians here. I always wondered about the Inner ones, myself…
I went to bat for a clerk about a year ago in a TJ Maxx. I am bloinde, blue eyed, soccer mom-ish. The registers were closed–the store was closing soon on a slow day, apparently.
There were 2 registers open at the service desk. 3 people behind the counter–one is dealing with something (some kind of return)–she is not at a register, There are about 6 people in line–3 each at each register. Hardly a stampede. I am chewing cud, wondering about the blouse I am about to buy, among other things.
Ahead of me, suffering from Mad Cow Disease, in the other line is Ms Suburban Country Club. I say this because her bag matched her shoes, which coordinated with her Capris, which contained the color of her nail polish. She is also blonde and blue eyed (but I am better looking! really!). The clerks are black (AA). Ms SCC is literally tapping her foot–keep in mind, she is NEXT in line. The transaction is finished and now it’s her turn.
I don’t remember what the issue was, but it was trifling and specious. A simple matter of a credit card check, I think. She went ballistic. She wanted the clerk’s name, the head clerk’s name etc and she said this,“you never know when Corporate will be coming to visit your store and monitor YOUR customer service–I’d watch it if I were you.”
Well, at that, I had heard enough. I said, in my mooey bellow, “what is your problem?”
She turned all huffy to me, saw that I was white and hesitated for a second. Then she says, “I want good service”
I said, “you had it. Now it’s this lady’s turn” (turning to an elderly black woman who is behind Ms SCC).
Ms SCC stomps out, tail lashing.
I looked at the clerk, who was close to tears and said, “well, that was interesting. If you want my name, in case she makes trouble, I would be happy to share my take on what happened.”
I thought all 3 clerks were gonna jump over the counter and kiss me. We all had a good laugh at Ms CC’s hot pink nail polish and called it a day.
My family is not Roman Catholic. You’re being as presumptous as that woman was.
She was overstepping her authority. My mom did not ask her help in guiding me, and it was not this woman’s business what I was like any time I wasn’t in her store.
It wasn’t her job to decide what lesson I had to learn. It was her job to get me to quiet down, and nothing else.
You are as stupid as you were bratty. The fact that you are not Catholic has nothing to do with the fact that much of the world believes seven is plenty old enough to know better than to act like the Crown Princess of the World.
You’d’ve prefered she said, “Shut the fuck up, you little bitch?” How about, “Take your fucking brat out of this store if she won’t shut up or I will call the cops?” All told, “That’s not how good children talk to their mothers,” is sounding pretty good by comparison with some of the options that limit themselves to quieting you down.
That is not my family’s beliefs. And that’s all they are: beliefs. Not facts. You don’t get to impose beliefs on someone else, no matter how many other people share them.
She did not have to say any of those things. All she had to say was “Please be quiet.” Or “Please calm your child down.” That’s all. There was no call for editorializing.
For fuck’s sake, are you just about done? People whose kids are acting like shits rarely take comments about it well, no matter how well-deserved. And people who simply must comment on the slightest misbehavior from other people’s kids are annoying as hell. We don’t really have any objective way of determining which your particular scenario was, but your original description made it sound more like the former. Maybe it wasn’t, and you’re an angel who just tells stories badly. There’s little point in going back and forth about it for hours.
Well, I’ll stop if you will.