Is it just me, or are parents getting lazier and lazier in teaching their children common courtesy?
I had to pop down to the convenience store today to pick up a few things, and took my bike as usual, chaining it up on the rack outside the store. Right beside this store there is a Dairy Queen, which had a bunch of people hanging outside it on the benches eating ice cream. Among them there were a group of about 5 noisy kids and their parents. These kids were running around while eating, letting out earsplitting screeches, almost banging right into me. I finally managed to get around them and get into the store.
When I came out not five minutes later, one of the brats was absentmindedly giving the back tire of my bike little kicks with the tip of his shoe, while another one was screeching to her brother while slapping her ice-cream-smeared hand on my bike seat. Their stupid fucking cattle-brained parents just sat there and watched them do this while stuffing their faces with ice cream. They were literally watching their hellspawn touching someone else’s property and didn’t say a damn word. I shot them a dirty look, which I don’t think even registered with them, from the vapid stares on their faces. I put a kleenex over the sticky seat and got out of there before I said or did something I might regret. Granted, they didn’t actually damage my bike, but when I was a kid my parents never ever let me touch something that wasn’t mine. The brats had no business messing with it.
I know not all parents/kids are like this…I’ve come across some darn good and polite kids…but what the hell? Doesn’t this kind of rude behaviour seem to be increasing?
I’m sorry, but by NOT saying anything, you just furthered the idea that these morons can be proud for the way their children are being raised. I make it a point to give dirty looks to idiot parents whose children act like hellspawn in public. If a look won’t work, I drop a comment to the parents.
If THAT doesn’t work, and the children are old enough to be chastened a bit, I let them know that their behavior is unacceptable. In the past I have made young children clean up their messes in fast food restaurants, and other things like cleaning a pice of my property soiled by their fucking around.
I certainly hope I do a better job parenting than some of these morons who just decided to drop kids left and right without any clue of how to raise them to be decent beings.
Yeah, I should have said something. I like to try to avoid confrontations though, and they’d probably be the kind of people who instead of realizing their mistake, would instead accuse me of being a nasty kid-hater or something. In which case would piss me off more. It’s always hard for me to tell when I really should speak up and when I shouldn’t.
IMHO you have to play it by ear. I’ve certainly made comments to unsupervised children in public places. Example: I saw two youngsters who were old enough to have been taught better opening up containers of shampoo and conditioner in the supermarket, presumably to check out what they smelled like. I just said, “Stop that! That doesn’t belong to you!” and they scurried off. Similarly, a couple years ago I was on a very nice ferry from Delaware to Cape May NJ. A group of youngsters were dashing about, tearing up & down the stairs, and so on; clearly a violation of the safety regulations that were posted everywhere. When one of the kids almost bowled me over, I spoke to him VERY harshly and told him that what they were doing was wrong, and dangerous, and that if they continued their whole family would be banned from the ferry system forever. He kind of crept away, looking over his shoulder, probably to tell somebody about the weird lady that scolded him.
Shrieking is one thing; messing around with other people’s stuff is something else. If no effort is made to correct the behavior, the kid thinks its an o.k. thing to do.
There’s also a difference between shrieking as an attention-getting device or temper tantrum and shrieking as a part of play activities. It also depends on the age of the child.
One of my daughters had (actually still has, but has learned to control it) a voice that would shatter eardrums, if not glass. Until she did learn the difference between an “indoor” and “outdoor” voice, and between playgound and other public places behavior, we did not go to a lot of places. Or when she could not moderate her activity or her voice, we would leave.
She is now an adult, a paragon of appropriate behavior, and has been known to wax indignant at seeing misbehaving children of the sort described in this thread.
A friend and I went to the Botanical Gardens in Fort Worth and were shocked to see about nine kids gaily tearing up the bamboo while their oblivious mothers chatted with each other. At one point one of the little bratlets actually started chasing another guest, trying to whack them with a switch of bamboo.
Yup. I had a thread a couple days back about some fleabrain ignoring her kidlet till he started screeching loud enough to etch glass and knock tiles off the ceiling.
There is nothing wrong with YOU telling the brats to get away from your property, you know. Shooting dirty looks at the parents will get you nowhere. A good loud “HEY! Get away from that!” will usually get the job done.
Well, you’re in an ice cream store so I think some freedom should be left to the kids. I not sure what level of “shrieking” you’re talking about here. (some of y’all non-parental types have a procivity for exaggerating. )
But I am with you 100% on the whole “don’t touch stuff that isn’t your’s” These parents need to be bitch slaped.
Also, don’t blame the kids. It’s the parents fault. So if anybody deserves any name calling, it’s them.
I second the talk to the business approach. They shouldn’t want to lose your business, and the doofy parents won’t want to drive farther to go elsewhere. Is this really a recent thing? Did kids behave better in years gone by?
It’s not the responsibility of the business. They didn’t spawn these evil ill-mannered cretins. Did kids behave better in years gone by? You bet your ass. My mother or father would have knocked me into next week for slopping ice cream on someone’s property. That’s simply stuff you don’t do.
You know, I’ve just gotten to where I will correct the kids whether the parents are standing there or not. Standing in line at a bank, I saw a four/five year old boy start to play at a bank worker’s desk. Mama didn’t notice. Then the kid started to pound on the keyboard. At that point I called, “young man, that is not yours, and you don’t need to be over there.” THAT got the mom’s attention, and she chewed the kid out. Today, at a showing of ROTS, there was a group of boys, elementary school age behind me. I didn’t mind the chatter, because it was still commercials. But when they started ricocheting off my seat and the seat next to me, I turned around, gave them The Lood (it involves glaring at them over te rim of my glasses and lengthening my jaw) and said “Gentlemen. Do. Not. Do. That.” Apparently, the lady sitting next to them, who’d had nothing to say - and so I assumed they didn’t belong to her - got all het up and announced, “ma’am, I will take care of this.” Good. Better fucking well take care of it, because I have no problem with you feeling embarrassed while I chew your kids’ rude butts out in public.
The Look also involves spelling correctly. Heavens only knows what a Lood is. Maybe it’s something like the bastinado. That would have been much more fun.
I know just what you mean about rules and in this case, boundaries. I wonder if parents are so busy they forget to teach manners and boundaries. Who knows? The parents you described do sound socially clueless. Anyway here are some words that might have helped…
“This bike belongs to me. It’s not okay for you to touch it”
or
“This bike belongs to me. You have to ask to touch it”
or
“This bike belongs to me. I don’t like that you touched it.”
No dirty looks needed. Just send the message, hop on and go.
A little off topic but, I have to inject my Bad Grandma story.
I was in a grocery store restroom one afternoon and there was a little girl, about 2-21/2 years old and her grandma. Grandma was yelling her ass off at the little girl telling her she HAD to go to the bathroom and she HAD to do it NOW.
(There are few things 2 years old has control over. Her bodily functions is one of them. How would YOU like to have someone berating the hell out of you demanding that you go to the bathroom NOW whether you had to or not?)
Anyway, Grandma continued to yell like a freak at the child to the point of threatening her (!) who quickly became reduced to tears. I mean sobs…
So I came out of the stall and Grandma acted like she didn’t know anyone was in there. She seemed a tad embarrassed when she said “I bet you think I’m a bad Grandma”. And as I towel dried my hands I said “Yes Ma’am, I do”.
Then walked out. You know what? There are adults in this world who NEED other adults to react to them. I say just do it so long as you aren’t abusive yourself.
I don’t think it’s nearly that deliberate; I think a lot of parents have just plain learned to ignore their kids being hellions, the way I got used to the train when I spent a summer living 100 yards from the train tracks.
I frequently have parents bring their kids with them to their own doctor visits. This bugs me for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I’ve often needed to ask about sensitive information with the kids sitting there. But it bugs me more because the kids are almost always poorly-behaved; they interrupt my conversation with the parent every fifteen seconds, run around the room, play with all the medical equipment–while the parent remains completely oblivious.
When I start in practice in a few months, I want to have a policy against this, but I know a lot of parents get upset about things like that, and my employers won’t want to discourage them from coming. I can’t really ask the nursing staff to watch them, either. I don’t know how to go about it.
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