Meant to add, DoctorJ, what about having a play area with at least one person hired to be in there and watch the patient’s kids while the patient is with the doctor? Two people to watch the children might be better, so they can take “staggered” breaks. Maybe when you become your own boss, you can get a set up like that? It’d cost more, but probably be worth it in the long run.
I have worked in retail for a long time and we often have discussions about how badly behaved kids are now. People really need to teach their kids to respect other peoples property. There seems to be an attitude that since it’s a store the kids have every right to “play” with the displays. No they don’t. Laptop computers and exspensive cameras are not there for your kids to play with. Do not take merchadise off the shelf you have no intention of buying and let them play with it for your convenience. Teach them how to ask for permission. Teach them how to have a little consideration for other people. Indoor voice or outdoor voice. Learn how to say NO and mean it.
I’ve seen kids destroy merchandise and their parents feel no obligation to pay for it. “They’re just kids” Yes and they’re your kids. That makes YOU responsible for their behaviour in public.
One of the best parents I ever saw had a small boy who started to get a little upset and she hunkered down next to him and took five minutes to talk to him in a soft but clear voice about why we act a certain way in public and why he couoldn’t touch everything he wanted to. It was a beautiful sight.
I’m in favor of speaking to the parents if they’re nearby or the kids if they’re not. I’ve had several parents get upset with me for correcting their kids. I’m always flabbergasted when parents let small children roam the store unsupervised. Not only is it horrible manners but it’s not safe for your kids.
I know you may not get a pleasant response by asking parents to control their kids but if more employees and or managers, as well as other shoppers, made it a habit then eventually these lazy parents would get the idea. Avoiding confrontation and griping about it to others doesn’t help much.
“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?”
On the first day of school I was told by a parent “We haven’t done discipline yet, we thought we’d leave it to you.”…
This sounds like one of those “kids these days” rants that’s been going around since Ancient Greece.
Kids are no different; kids will now and always have tried to get away with everything they can. Parents are slightly different, mostly by reason of being overworked and guilty about it, and so indulging their kids so as to “enjoy their precious time together” without dealing with tantrums. These are also the same parents who were raised by the first generation of self-esteem parenting of the late seventies, and so have no fucking clue how to be good parents themselves.
But you know what’s *really *different? Neighbors. Strangers. People on the street.
When I hear my parents and grandparents talk about the “good old days” of Properly Behaved Children, what I hear is something like this: “Why, in my day, if I mouthed off to the teacher I’d be hided right there in front of everyone, and on my walk home, all the neighbor moms would scold me over the fence and the news had already gotten to my Ma and she’d be waiting for me with a bar of soap and no dinner!” or “We’d never act like that in public because it would sure get back to Ma, post-haste!”
Parents need to know when our kids are being brats when we’re not around *and *we need the implicit support of those around us that punishment won’t mean our kids will be taken away by the state for abuse. That’s the part that’s seriously lacking. It’s turned into a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario. Discipline your kid in public? You’re an obvious abuser, mean bitch of a bad grandma. (Not that I agree with screaming at a kid to go to the bathroom; I assume her verbal approach would happen for other infractions as well.) Don’t discipline your kid in public? You end up with bratty deviants.
Sure, some kids respond to The Look. Some don’t. Some need a talking to, others literally can’t hear you. But the second you grab your child’s arm and physically restrain him, someone’s giving you a shocked look like you’re a second away from beating the crap out of him. I literally had Mall Security called on me once for hugging a child (not mine, I was the nanny) to me in the middle of a tantrum. I was stopping him from throwing things or hurting himself, but his screams coming from within my enveloping arms made someone think I was abusing him. (My normal choice of removing a tantrumy kid to the car wasn’t an option. Not only would he not walk, he was too big to carry and we had taken the bus.) He wasn’t generally a brat, he was overwhelmed and overtired and couldn’t handle his own emotions for a few minutes without my help. But I’m sure it looked like he was a brat to all the bystanders.
All that being said, the kids in the OP were brats. They should not have been touching the bike. The parents were fucking clueless nimrods who should have at least made an attempt to stop them, or else moved their little circus away from the bike rake. It would not be innappropriate to speak harshly to a kid if the parent is clearly being negligent.
Running and screaming, I’m a little more lenient on given the sugar shot they’d been given in the form of ice cream. I’m not a fan of ice cream as a public snack, because it pretty much acts like crack cocaine. Fun at home in the yard, not well tolerated in public.
Not one single person to watch your child for the hour or two it takes to go to the doctor? Sorry, I am not buying it. It seems to me that everyone should have at least one babysitter they can call on if need be. No friends? No moms of your kid’s friends? No neighborhood kids?
Just FYI: Etiquette expert Miss Manners has a stock solution to the dilemma of what to do about other people’s hellspawn when the hell-spawners are neglecting their disciplinary duties. Namely, you say something that focuses on concern for the child’s safety instead of directly criticizing his/her bratty mannerlessness.
E.g., “Don’t do that, dear! If you kick/hit my bicycle it might fall over on you and you might get hurt!”
“Oops, better leave that bamboo alone: some of the plants here aren’t safe to touch and you might get hurt!”
“Better go back to your chair now, sweetie: if you run into a waitress, her tray might spill on you and you might get hurt!”
Miss Manners advises making these comments with as much sincere sympathetic concern as possible, accompanied by just enough of “The Lood” to convey to the child that yes indeed, there is a serious menace somewhere in this situation so s/he had better straighten up and fly right.
Of course, this sort of diplomatic alarmism just reinforces the overprotective paranoia all too prevalent in child-rearing already, but it beats both getting into a quarrel with offended parents and letting hyper-rambunctious kids spread chaos and destruction.
Well, in my case, I’m not in a good position to complain, since I am generally conducting a psychological evaluation of the child, and on many occasions, the child has a disruptive behavior disorder that has brought them to be evaluated in the first place. I don’t feel it’s my responsibility to amuse the child, it is simply a pragmatic matter of needing to keep the child occupied while I get information from the parent. So I am in somewhat of a different boat than Doctor J.
WhyNot is the voice of wisdom, as usual.
In my circle of family and friends, it’s pretty common to help correct each other’s offspring. Sort of whatever adult is closest thing, although if it’s more of A Serious Talking To needed, then we gently lead the child to it’s parent.
I’m also the mom that will correct other kids on the street or playground, but since kids seem to play unsupervised since about the age of 6, there isn’t a parent around so I don’t get into any stepping-on-toes weirdness. I sorta keep waiting for one of the kids I’ve yelled at to grow up and come egg my house as a teenager, but nothing so far.
I’d be horrified if I was somehow oblivious to my child wreaking havoc in public and would hope someone would bring it to my attention, alas the parents in the OP probably wouldn’t care anyway.
As a single parent I have taken my child with me to doctor’s appointments, however. You generally know what’s going to be involved, a 5 minute look at my ears, nose and throat to agree there’s an infection and hand me a script is totally different than a yearly gyno appointment. Of course I’d prefer not having to schlep the kid with me, but when it happens I deal with it and concern myself with making sure he’s behaving correctly.
Doctor J I don’t think it ought to be your job to provide childcare, of course not. I dunno about other professions, but the latest trend in dentists advertising around me seems to be using things like And your kids will love our PS2 and toy corner! so maybe there is a growing trend to address this issue somehow.
I can see a couple of problems with this. First, what happens when the parent has to go elsewhere for further testing or has to be directly admitted to the hospital? Would DoctorJ’s office be responsible for the children while Mom or Dad leaves the immediate area to get an X-ray at the imaging center across the street? Would these people be responsible for caring for the children until someone else can be found if Mom or Dad has to go into the hospital? If not, the problem is not only not solved, but magnifies.
Second, there are liability and financial issues involved. Finding people to take this job costs money; you’d have to run ads, check references,and do background checks, and once you have employees, they expect a living wage and possibly benefits. If there are no children to watch, would they do other things, like filing or insurance paperwork? And buying and maintaining toys costs money, too. This would take resources that could otherwise be used for the care and supplies that patients should get. And what happens if a child gets hurt while under the care of a caregiver? Internal medicine offices aren’t equipped to take care of children, and diverting staff and resources to care for a child’s injury takes away from actual patients.
A possible solution is to set up a cooperative daycare center in the building; each practice contributes a little money to hire professional staff, buy toys, and so forth, and each practice could offer that as a patient benefit to those with appointments. Or DoctorJ’s office could offer a list of Mother’s Day Out programs and daycare centers that permit one-day attendance.
Robin
I would have told whomever (plural) to shut their screaming kids up in the middle of my graduation if it weren’t for the fact that I probably would have been dragged off by security and ruined it even more for all the rest of my classmates. I’m pretty surprised our Dean didn’t pause in her speech to tell people to take their hollering kids outside but I’m certain everyone was labouring under the assumption that people who attend doctoral graduations tend to have the courtesy to give the grads their day and/or realise that it’s an adult occasion.
I think that it is, by virture of it having become a more litigious society. People don’t dare take chances in disciplining other people children.
I remember 30 years ago growing up in PA, running between two adults having a conversation. One of them reached down and grabbed my upper arm as I went by stopping me in my tracks. Given my speed, I lost my footing for a moment and was actually being held upright by his hold on me. I recieved a scolding and learned that it was rude to run between people who are talking, especially adults.
That incident left me with a bruise on my arm that faded in a couple days and an ingrained habit to * Never* pass between people who are talking. Even when I have to, (because they are blocking a hallway and there is no way around) I am extremely uncomfortable about it.
I doubt that anyone would dare do that nowadays for fear of being sued.
I dislike graduations because I dislike sitting on a hard seat and listening while a long list of names is recited (in fact, I’m convinced this causes time to stand still). I can’t imagine forcing small children to go.
Reading this thread reminds me of why people like Littlecats. She’s polite and well behaved, because she knows that nothing less is acceptable. It is amusing to see the reaction from adults when she says “please” and “thank you,” when so many other kids act as though they were raised by wolves. Actually, that’s an insult to wolves-in some cases wolves would be better parents.
Another voice saying praise the parents when you encounter them with their well-behaved kids. I was riding the subway some years ago in Boston when a woman and her little boy got on and rode in my car for a few stops. The kid’s manners were lovely, and I made a point of telling the woman that, and that she was doing a wonderful job of raising her son. Man, did that ever light up her face! Parents need that kind of affirmation, it’s a hard enough job in the best of circumstances.
Yes, that’s right.
When my kids were little, we moved every 18 months or so (husband’s job has frequent postings), and we were continents away from my family, and a country’s length away from his family.
The worst time was when the first was small, not yet at kindy, and I was pregnant with the second. We were totally isolated. Husband was sent on a six month temporary posting when I was a month pregnant, and we were on our own for a month at a time, in a town I knew absolutely no-one in.
Everyone SHOULD have someone they can ask, but not everyone DOES.
Wow. Some real brat stories here.
I think the ripping up of the bamboo was the one that pissed me off the most. Partly because bamboo takes so long to grow, and partly because the brats had complete disregard and disrespect for a living thing. If I had ever done that as a kid - Holy Hannah. That would have benn it for me.
That being said, besides not teaching manners, parents also seem awfully lax in teaching respect for the environment, too. I remember once when I was maybe 5, coming back from the store with my mom, I threw a gum wrapper on the ground. She grabbed me by the ear and gave me the sternest, scariest glare I’d ever seen, and said, “You don’t EVER do that.” And she made me go pick it up and put it in the trash. And I never did litter again.
I think there’s a lot of truth to this. I think it’s exaggerating the pervasiveness and the effect of any parenting style to say that it’s somehow creating a generation of little monsters. But there have been major changes in our social structure - most people in the middle class live in suburbs and live, to some extent, the fairly isolated suburban life. They’re friendly with their immediate neighbors but beyond that, the community is physically spread apart, and people don’t stay very long in any one place. Contrast this with a small town where everyone knows everyone (and folks therefore feel a little more comfortable scolding the neighbor’s child) or with urban communities of days past (which were a lot more like tightly-knit small towns than many people realize.)
I don’t think “self-esteem parenting” and so forth is so universal, and so destructive to a child, that it’s creating a generation of hellions. It’s easy to develop a skewed view of the world through observation - the dozen kids who are just sitting and quietly entertaining themselves just don’t register the way the one who is shrieking and spilling animal crackers does. The hundred times you buy ice cream without coming out to find a child screwing around with your bike aren’t significant, whereas the one exception is. Plus it’s natural to be a little nostalgic about the past, and to compare your own parents with the absolute worst parents you see in public, and so miss the fact that most kids are probably acting about the same as they did a generation ago.
But I think it’s very significant that the nuclear family is now viewed as, essentially, a unit, complete in itself. Nowadays it’s violating social rules to reprimand another’s child, whereas it used to be the norm in many areas. I think this is more of a consequence of broader social changes than a single, isolated cultural change.
Parents can do a lot to control their kids. A parent who concedes that they can’t control their own child is like waving a white flag of parenting. I’m not a parent, but I work with kids, so I have a few speculations on this matter-
1.) Parents who ‘give up’ or hand over responsibility of discipline onto others may have come from this so-called ‘self-esteem’ generation, and can’t will themselves to speak harshly at their child, or punish their child because it makes them feel bad/guilty.
2.) The parent is so used to the behavior of the child, and their tools for dealing with it are so ineffective, that they basically ‘tune out’ the shrieking/running/destroying/etc. Thus at the point in which you, the Doper, notice this behavior, it is simply flying under the parent’s radar.
3.) People with poor social habits often pass those habits on to their children. Perhaps parents that have a ‘what’s in it for me?’ type of attitude put this mentality on their children, who see no benefit to behaving. A lot of times these kids are hard to deal with- they don’t respond to threats or yelling, they simply don’t care what other people think. They’ve called their parents’ bluffs and are extremely bold and obnoxious. Many times the parents bribe the kid into behaving, something I think is really stupid. Should I get a big huge bonus at work just for coming in when I’m scheduled? No, they expect me to do that in the first place. Similiarly, kids that are rewarded for behaving normally will simply use that system to blackmail their parents, and for some kids, this extends up through high school (i.e. I will give you a cell phone/gas money/etc if you stop cutting class/doing drugs/shooting people).
I feel fortunate in that the tutoring center I work at has fantastic parents. Any time a child acts out, the parent is already dragging them outside by the time I turn my head. The parents are considerate in the knowlege that all of the families are paying money to have their children tutored there, and no parent would allow their child to ruin the experience for any other child in terms of disruptive behavior. This makes my job 1000x easier since I can concentrate on coaching kids in their schoolwork instead of having to be a referee/disciplinarian.
Really? They just expected you to come on in? Or did you, you know, agree to be paid in exchange for coming in to work?
Equating reinforcers with bribery is really stupid. At the most pedantic level of this discussion, I note that bribery is something that we give to someone to do something that they are not supposed to do. Otherwise we call it a reward. However, the larger issue is that expecting positive things to happen to us when we do something we are supposed to do is pretty common throughout life. (And likewise, expecting bad things to follow our doing something we are not supposed to do is fairly typical.)
In some parent-child dyads, these reciprocal exchanges have evolved through experience and trust or through explicit discussion to which you are not privy such that the child is generally well behaved during the time you interact with them.
For others, whether due to parent factors, child factors, or both, the process of reciprocal exchange has to be more tangible, explicit and proximal to the circumstances in question. This doesn’t make it any more stupid than it would be for your employer to just raise an eyebrow on your next payday when you go in expecting to get your paycheck. Do you begrudge the bank giving you a toaster when you open a new account, or the blood bank offering you a gift certificate for your donation, or the mayor giving you a ribbon when you save someone’s life, or your aunt sending you a thank you card…
I have to ask - why the animosity towards providing reinforcers for desirable behavior? I mean, it is one thing to question whether the process is necessary, but you seem quite annoyed or troubled by it. What harm is it doing you if parents elicit desireable behavior by promising a trip to the ice cream store when they are finished?
“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for
authority, they show disrespect to their elders… 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 are tyrants over their teachers.”
- Plato