user v1.05, you’ve already been warned about posting for attention and/or shock value. If you want to continue to post here, I’d suggest you knock it off right now.
Erp.
I think Highwayman is being satirical, but am not sure at all about v1.05. 
Noone should have to listen to sustained screaming from a child–I am not talking about pain cries (like on an airplane)–hopefully, the pain cry will be attended to immediately (unfortunately, it is often not attended to at all).
Frankly, the parenting skills I see out and about are abysmal and worse. To me, (and I base this strictly on my own 3), there is no reason for a kid to have a temper tantrum in the store. I never had twins, and I am sure that has its own set of challenges. No help from me there, just good wishes.
Call me crazy, but I didn’t set my kids up for failure. You don’t drag15 month olds to the Mall of America and expect them to do the marathon shopping. That is unreasonable and moronic.
Yes, sometimes, you can’t help it-the sitter isn’t available or Grandman is still exhausted from the last time she watched them. And lil ones do need to learn what is expected in a public place.
What is wrong with paying attention to the kids whilst shopping? TALK to them–engage them in the process, somehow, someway.
Have a short list and break it up with trips to the water fountain/cookie store/balloon man-whatever. If you are stuck at the car repair, you shoulda packed snacks and games/books etc. At the very least, you can draw funny pics on the back of your deposit slips for the lil guys. A 2 y/0 and I once cleaned out my purse–I taught him the names of everything in my purse (my purse is G-rated). He was fascinated.
C’mon folks-it ain’t rocket science. Get off the effing cell phone, pay attention to your kids and maybe the tantrum would not even occur.
If it does, I reccommend this: there are two main approaches.
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the Andy Griffith way(if you are alone)–look at the tantrum-er with a mild, scientific gaze. Look somewhat puzzled by this strange alien occurrence. Keep that look on your face. Kid will eventually stop and look to see if he has an audience. When he stops (to get a breath) ask him quietly “what are you doing?” Sound puzzled. This works for older kids. Worked for Opie!
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Isolation: leave the store-temporarily. Yes, it IS a PIA–but the noise pollution is worse. and is rude to every other person in that store. Sitting in the car (ignore the kids in the car) until he has calmed down, adressing the need and then returning to finish the shopping should work(see below).
UNLESS you are shopping with an overtired, hungry, wet toddler or similiar. That is why I keep coming back to meet the needs of the kid. Pay attention to him; it matters.
<climbs off soapbox>
That mother is an idiot…and a teacher at a Baytown school. Poor kids.
The kid wasn’t throwing a tantrum. He wanted to talk with his mom, and Mom ignored him and ignored him and ignored him until he finally started screeching.
If she’d answered him the first or second time he called her name, I’m betting there would never have been a screech.
Screeching and tantrums are two entirely different things. A tantrum involves a lot of kicking and screaming and crying. This kid was just letting out an ear-splitting screech because he was frustrated that Mom couldn’t be bothered to talk to him.
True enough. But as a mother who (generally speaking) paid attention to her kids (just ask my daughter Dragonblink) I maintain that if the stupid mother had just for pity’s sake answered the kid the first or second time he said “Mommy?” the whole thing would never have happened.
It wasn’t the kid’s fault. He had no other way to deal with his utter frustration at being completely ignored by his mom when all he wanted to do was talk with her.
infamousmom, I understand what you’re saying, but in that case, why did you yell “STOP IT!” to the kid, instead of saying something along the lines of “Excuse me, ma’am, I think your son wants to tell you something.”?
Also, your thread title is misleading, asking what the deal is with “shrieking kidlets”, and providing the answer in the OP, that the problem is parents who ignore their kids.
You betcha. It helps to be a middle-aged woman. Older kids have already been taught by several different middle-aged women and have received a bit of conditioning; a middle-aged woman who says “Stop that” in terms of absolute authority has probably a 90% chance of being obeyed. It helps to be willing to put up with a certain amount of “You can’t make me” lip without comment, because if you can just stand there calmly acting as though there’s no other choice but to obey, chances are pretty good it’ll work.
Younger kids will often stop-that simply because someone they never saw before is telling them to stop, and the sheer novelty of this situation does the trick.
Not long ago I was in a store and two kids circa 4 and 2 were running around and the little girl was shrieking. Not in frustration but in sheer enjoyment of being able to run around and disrupt the store. Nary a parent in sight. After a couple of shrieks, I looked the girl firmly in the eye and said “Stop that. This is not the playground.” Wow, instant silence!
The clerk who’d been straightening up the display rack next to me said “Are those your children?” When I said “No, they’re not,” he responded with “Oh, I love you!”
One simple management method. “The Look” I got it from my parents, and I give it to my daughter. “The Look” means that you’d best cut out your shit immediately or there will be hell to pay. If eye contact isn’t readily establishable, then there is a firm grip on the shoulder which causes a child to look at the gripper, offering opportunity for “The Look”. A stern “HEY” is also adequate for attracting attention such that “The Look” may be administered.
When growing up, I knew “The Look” from any adult, and reacted appropriately, knowing the next step. 
Oh, lovely, lovely. Yeah baby, ignore that tantrum. Of course, everyone else in the vicinity who also has to ignore the tantrum might not feel quite so virtuous about it.
This kid wasn’t throwing a tantrum. He was expressing his frustration at being totally ignored by his mother, when all he wanted to do was talk to her. There really was little else he could have done. He was strapped into the stroller and Mama thought her discussion of whatever-it-was with some lady behind the bakery counter was way more important than answering him.
Take it from a mom who had a kid who threw world-class tantrums and who was also the size of a kid two years older than he actually was. You do **NOT **ignore a tantrum in a public place. You do **NOT **subject everyone else in the public place to your kid’s meltdown. You take the kid out, pronto, and let the tantrum run its course in the car in the parking lot. Then, and only then, if the kid seems willing to behave, do you go back into the public place. Otherwise, you take the kid home. Period.
And I’ve got a well-adjusted, gifted, high-achieving set of former tantrum-throwers (now ages 28 and almost-25) to back me up on this.
Good points. However, I was not close enough to the parent to make that possible (and thank goodness for that; I have a hearing problem called “recruitment” that makes things sound a lot louder than they really are, and if the kid had let loose that kind of screech while I was next to him, I probably would have barfed from the pain). The kid was not going to stop screeching and the mom was not going to stop ignoring him. I wanted to get both their attention at once. Kids who are interrupted in mid-screech by a stranger usually stop; mothers who are jolted out of oblivion by the sudden notice that those kindly strangers all around don’t want to keep listening to screeching usually do something about it.
I’m sorry. I disagree. See, this is part of what causes the problem in the first place. Some parents’ perception of when it’s “possible”.
Most of the time, “it’s not possible” really means that the parent doesn’t want to sacrifice whatever he happens to be doing at the time. That’s part of being a parent. To parent properly, sometimes (a LOT of times when they’re little), you have to sacrifice what you want to do at the moment with teaching good behaviour to the child.
If you’re in a store for instance (an experience I had the other day) looking at and trying on clothing, and your little boy is bored and throwing hissy fits you leave. He gets taken out to the car and he doesn’t get to do what HE wants to do then.
You don’t keep trying to outshout him with "mommy gets to do what she wants first, then you’ll get to “abc’, noooooOO, mommy said you have to be good…don’t you want to “abc”?”, and all the while jr is screaming and fussing.
Unless one is trapped on a plane (and even then, there’s the lavatory), it is ALWAYS possible to remove the child from the situation. It may not be what the parent wants to do, but it IS possible.
Letting a child scream bloody murder out in public while you blithely chitchat away is clueless and classless.
You don’t have to do this every time you go to the store. See, if you use your head, and make planned training outings, or have others to assist you, as another poster said above (sorry, can’t remember, but EXCELLENT point, and the way I taught my kids also), it only takes a few times.
You don’t try to make it a training exercise when you have no food in the house, and everyone is tired, hungry and cranky. You make a trip designed to “catch” him at it, and then to make the consequences of his actions count for him.
If being taken out of the store and told “sorry, we could have had lasagna, but now we’ve got to have tomato soup, because that’s all there is, and you wouldn’t behave in the store” is what it takes, then that’s what you do. And again, done right, and CONSISTANTLY is the key.
Kids KNOW when a parent can be manipulated with crying and screaming in the store, they know that the parent “needs” to get this shopping done, and they “can’t” leave the store, so the kid will use that to his advantage. And when he does that, and you have the idea “well, I have to do this, others will just have to put up with it” he knows it and will do his/her level best to make you as miserable and embarrassed as possible in the hopes of getting his way.
One or two “sorry, we can’t have the yummy thing we were going to have because you wouldn’t let mommy shop” WILL work.
I forgot to add in my personal “works the very best” tantrum interrupter.
My daughter never really did the tantrum thing, so I don’t know if this works with girls too. But for my son? Any mention of something “gross” will nip the tantrum in the bud.
Like “dog farts”, “boogers”, any thing little boys find gross and funny. It only took two or three gross expressions before he was cracking up.
First try my son would grump “stop it…”
Second try he’d be fighting a smile
Third or maybe fourth, if he was really in a fit, he’d be laughing and begging for more.
I talked to the wife about this last evening, and though the Child Quiet ™ brand Duct Tape idea didn’t fly, she did relate to me the wisdom imparted by a former co-worker of hers.
The kids started acting up in the supermarket. They were warned not to misbehave.
They continued to misbehave. All of the items they requested were removed from the basket, and they were told why, and warned not to continue misbehaving.
They continued to misbehave. The Mom brought the carriage to the front of the store, spoke to the manager, (manager thanked her btw) and had the carriage stored in the cooler for a couple of hours. The children were returned home, and punished (not sure exactly what the punishment was) with yet another explanation as to why they were being punished. Mom returned later to retrieve the carriage, and continued the shopping, NOT replacing any of the child requested items.
During the next trip to the market, the kids were NOT allowed to request any special items, again with an explanation as to why, but with a promise that “next time” they might be granted their requests, if they behaved. They did, and the next visit they got (1) special request each.
Future misbehavior resulted in a similar procedure, which apparently only needed to happen a second time. Cause and effect… it works folks. If you let them misbehave, and continue to reward them, guess what? They will continue to misbehave.
Just as children learn what they can get away with, they will also learn what they can’t get away with.
Did it inconvience the Mom? Certainly, did it fix the problem in the long run? Absolutely.
Thankfully, at my house, I do all the shopping, so if kids are misbehaving, guess what? They’ll stay home with Mom instead.
You putting up with your kids crying is your responsibility. Your kids are not MY responsibility, and I should not be inconvienced by their misbehavior.
Did you notice the words “in the grocery store” where I said “in the grocery store”?
I am sure that your children, should you have any, always behaved with perfect decorum in public, and ended any deviation from this standard with the snap of a finger.
As I mentioned earlier, children should not routinely be ignored, and as RickJay mentioned, sometimes they have tantrums. Perfection in child-rearing is a good standard, no doubt. It seems often to be applied, however, only to Other People’s Children.
I tended to ignore my children when they had tantrums. It seems to have worked out. I also tended to ignore the dolts in the grocery store who glared at me because I couldn’t turn the tantrums off by pressing a button, and couldn’t remove the crying child on the instant. That tended to work out well too.
Regards,
Shodan
Sure you could, it was just inconvenient. It’s all about you, fuck everybody else.
Certainly, which led to my followup question (I’ll repeat it in hopes of getting an answer this time):
So, was your learning laboratory with strangers as guinea pigs confined to grocery stores?
Ah, a strawman argument. No one is suggesting that your (or any) kids should be perfect at all times, only that parents should show consideration for others, rather than subjecting them to loud extended screaming as a learning tool for one’s offspring.
Of course, that’s the generous explanation. The more likely reasons for failing to deal with out-of-control kids in public are laziness, fear of confronting misbehavior and being seen as a Meanie, and sheer obliviousness/cluelessness (if your home is in a constant uproar, you may become accustomed to the volume level and not notice it in a public setting).
Yes, there’s that too - “It’s my kids, my life, and screw everyone else around me.” :rolleyes:
I think (from observation in local stores) some kids scream so much the parent doesn’t even hear it anymore. I have seen people calmly carry on a conversation when I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying (except the screaming rugrat in the cart, who everyone within a city block could hear).
I know not all parents ignore their kids, and there are some good kids out there. I make a point of complimenting parents whose kids are behaving well - I can only imagine how difficult it is, and everyone deserves to know their efforts are noticed.
I just haven’t figured out a polite way to ask “If you are going to totally ignore your child, why in hell did you have it in the first place?”
KellyM pointed out that some people whom I thought were mothers ignoring their childer were likely au pairs. I still don’t get it.
It was confined to times and to places where I could not immediately remove the tantruming child or cut short the public excursion. As I mentioned, if you would read my posts a little more closely.
Sometimes, it’s unavoidable.
You’ll have to take my word for it as to when it is unavoidable. Because the opinions of those who make assumptions like this -
are really not people whose opinions are worthwhile to me.
Feel free to assume that every time a child throws a tantrum, the responsible adult is a bad and lazy parent. Feel free also to glare (such permission is retroactive - as I mention, my children’s last tantrum is years in the past). Feel free also not to act like a dim-witted and judgemental asshole who makes conclusions about parental fitness based on thirty seconds observation in a grocery store.
And of course, feel equally free to fuck off.
Regards,
Shodan