This is neither a rant nor a Pit thread. Please be adults and keep it from becoming one.
As I just walked through my urban neighborhood, I had to walk into the street in order to navigate around a typical yuppie mother with a double-wide stroller, stopped and chatting but still completely blocking the entire sidewalk without having made any attempt to move the strollers so that the sidewalk would be navigable by the multitudes of people trying to get by.
It just reminded me of a trend I’ve seen lately, as I live and work in this same neighborhood - it’s that all mothers of babies and toddlers - literally all of them - are inconsiderate, self-serving monsters who seem to put themselves and their babies first without any consideration for anyone else around them.
Why?
I’m talking about blocking entire sidewalks with double-wide strollers, barging through stores and knocking things over and blocking other people with said strollers, allowing the children to bother others and destroy merchandise and make messes with no attempt to prevent or control the behavior, and generally plowing through life with a sense of entitlement and complete disregard for anyone or anything around them.
Why?
I have a few ideas;
It’s hormonal? Maybe something about having such young children means that the women are flooded with “mama bear” hormones that cause irrational and inconsiderate behavior. It’s some sort of primal “put the babies first and screw everything and everyone else” thing.
My experience/sample is biased; I’m in the middle of Chicago, so I’m dealing with exclusively urban/yuppie mothers. These people are more affluent and do not work, therefore have a sense of entitlement and a pattern of such behavior that’s probably evident in all areas of life and was there before the children.
Some combination of the two? Is this a generally recognized phenomenon?
I think you’re going to get abuse for the “all” comment. In fact, I think you might get a lot of abuse anyway.
Personally, I have several new-mother friends, and one of them is considerate. None of the others are - they all appear to have gone somewhat bonkers. I’ve never had a child, so I don’t know what it’s like, but I think it’s hormonal, and has to do with the new baby becoming the most important thing in the universe to them, to the exclusion of all else.
There’s also a habit in Dublin of mothers using their strollers to stop traffic: they shove the stroller into the path of one’s car, causing one to slam on the brakes, then cross the road. Completely nuts.
Having said that, of my extensive experience in Asia, I have not noticed this trend there.
What is it about letting people have internet access that turns them into the type of person who would make an exxcessive overgeneralization, demand an answer to a badly flawed question, then post it in the wroing Forum on the SDMB.
Off to IMHO (since it does not yet seem to have turned into a Pitting and it seeks to poll the viewers for a response.
As Tomndebb has observed, it’s certainly a excessive generalisation.
Also your definitions differ from mine - Milosovic or Hussein qualify as ‘monsters’.
Wow. I know a pleasant mother in my town - are you absolutely sure you meant ‘literally’?.
Are you serious? Aside from the snippy personal attack (what IS it with the mods on the SDMB?), the entirety of my OP built around two factual, not opinion-based questions:
Is this a recognized/named/diagnosed/explanable phenomenon?
and
Is it hormonally-based?
I understand that you felt the need to degenerate the thread by throwing in some insults, but you definitely made a wrong call moving it out of GQ.
I’m going to take a stab at a serious answer. I don’t think it’s hormonal, although that’s the usual fall back excuse of men who wonder why women do anything they don’t like or approve of.
I think what you’re seeing is not so much women who are completely self absorbed as it is a symptom of being very, very tired. Mothers of toddlers and babies don’t get a boat load of sleep every night. They’re up every couple hours, most of them work for a living, and then there’s taking care of a small child when they get home and on the weekends as well. It’s extremely tiring. So tiring, in fact, that you lose perspective. It isn’t that you are intentionally being rude or thoughtless, it’s just that it’s difficult to be bothered by anything outside a three foot radius if it isn’t affecting you directly.
When my daughter was born, my son was a little over two years old. Her entire first year is a blur to me. I can’t remember anything specifically from that time. I may very well have exhibited some of the behavior you pointed out, but only because I was too damn tired to pay attention.
Interesting, Maureen! I forgot about that - that they’re probably worn out after constantly monitoring and dealing with the kids. I bet it’s both physically and mentally exhausting…kind of like how I feel after I get off of a 12-hour shift!
I think I know the answer to this, VCO3. The answer is confirmation bias. Because you’re convinced that mothers are bad people (I won’t dare delve into the reasons you hold such a belief), you notice mothers who are being bad people, and you don’t notice the mothers who are not.
I recently read a Yiddish proverb: the whole world is not crazy. Think on it.
Far, far more tired than that. Trust me; I’ve taken care of a baby, and I’ve worked 12-hour shifts, and there is no comparison at all.
Young babies wake a lot at night, as a consequence of which it’s difficult to have long periods of uniterrupted sleep. No amount of sleep in short chunks is as useful as a six-to-eight hour block of uninterrupted sleep. New mothers are often, simply put, exhausted to the point of the breaking of their endurance.
A lot of is is comfirmation bias, though. You’re simply not noticing the mothers that don’t block your way.
Also in the spirit of a genuine answer, I’d like to say that I think there is a great deal of truth in what Left Hand of Dorkness posted.
For instance, when boarding a plane, I sometimes get irritated at constantly being bum by people’s computer bags/backpacks/etc. and by how long it takes non-frequent flyers to get their stuff in the overhead and sit the heck down.
But then I remind myself that as an elite level flyer, I’ve boarded before most of the pax, am usually in the front of the plane and thus have almost all of them pass by me, and finally that this only happens usually with 5 or 6 pax. Out of a total load of 130-140 people, and most of these (on most, not all, flights) are non-frequent flyers.
So yeah, there is confirmation bias there on my part. I just have to keep reminding myself to quit being a butthead, I’m not anyone special.
I would assume it depends on what child it is. If it is a first child then I can see that. But if it were a 4th or 5th I don’t think a mother would still allow that. Since many people don’t have more than 2 kids I doubt they’d really get used to the idea of having a child running around. It must be a novelty for them.
Its probably just our culture and our relationship with kids. Todays generation seems more individuality oriented, less worried about social stigma which has good and bad to it. I personally don’t mind it when parents act this way.
I am not a mother (my penis tends to exclude me from this group) but I find your opinion ridiculous. People are rude, whether their uterus has been used or not. Try going through the supermarket with a cart. It’s not just the moms that won’t get out of the way. Try getting around a group of teenagers, talk about a sense of entitlement. Maybe it’s you that is rude.How about you deviate from your path by about 12 inches and go around the stroller. Do you know how hard it can be to move one of them big ones out of someones way? It is a lot easier for you to move than them. Or maybe they shouldn’t be allowed out of the house until the kids are bigger. After all they are taking up too much space on your sidewalk.
People are going to be jerks no matter if they are parents or are not. Or, are young or old, rich or poor, or posters to a message board or not. You are overgeneralizing. I know TWO urban Chicagoite mothers of young children, and neither of them are montsters.
Also, what you see as rude may be considerate in another direction - stroller tires can tear the hell out of a lawn, so if its a choice between blocking the sidewalk and making you walk across someones lawn, or parking a stroller on someone’s lawn - the most considerate alternative may be blocking the sidewalk.
For newbie moms, fear is a big factor. Being in charge of a tiny alien whose needs are a mystery is a terrifying experience. They’re preoccupied.
For moms of two (or more, Og love 'em), their brains are fried. That’s not to say that can’t & shouldn’t TRY to be considerate and aware of others, but it’s not likely to be their top priority.
/hijack
You might be surprised to know how much pressure a mother of little 'uns is under. It’s pretty amazing. They don’t give many clues as to how they are (and could DIE unexpectedly if you miss something important) (everybody you meet, every magazine you pick up, there’s a story of a baby who DIED inexplicably); they need constant care and will scream at the drop of a hat (and if they’re not fussy, it could be b/c they’re AUTISTIC) (should you get that vaccine or not?) (what about bird flu?), nobody actually knows “how” to do this “right” (except for nosy neighbors/relatives/former girlfriends who’ve become experts) (who’ll hint that you’re doing it WRONG) (and your baby’s going to DIE, or at least have DEVELOPMENTAL DELAYS), and many of our husbands are having as much or more trouble adjusting to this new (non)life as we are.
No. Your questions were clearly opinion based. As LHoD noted, you are most likely suffering from confirmation bias. A factual observation would be one in which an independent observer recorded all human interactions involving strollers (noting whether the person controlling the stroller was male or female and of an age to be presumed to be the parent or guardian or of an age to be a babysitter or grandparent), as well as noting human interactions that involved persons who were accompanied by children not in strollers, by pets, by human companions of a similar age, or using walkers or wheelchairs, or simply walking alone. If the result of that observation had been that 100% of the apparent mothers with strollers blocked the sidewalk when encountering acquaintances and some far smaller percent of all other groups had also blocked the sidewalks, then you might be able to claim a factual observation.
What you presented was an observation in which, in your opinion, mothers with strollers were universally rude while no (or few) other persons on the sidewalk displayed the same obliviousness regarding the people around them.
I know a neighborhood where I could make the claim that “all” the young guy drivers park in the street and exchange pleasantries, tying up any traffic that wishes to move through. It is a real phenomenon that I have observed. Of course, a more careful observation would reveal that all sorts of drivers in that area do the same thing–it happens to be an exurban area, previously rural, recently invaded by suburbanites looking to live “farther out” and the old custom of the neighborhood in which people routinely stopped to chat when encountering their neighbors is coming into conflict with a higher volume of traffic. The few times that I have had to wait when I was desperate to get someplace, the drivers happened to be working-class guys in their 20s. On the other hand, I have had to wait for geezers and matrons and middle-agers and teens in the same situation and it did not bother me because I was not in a hurry, so when I recall driving throught that area, my memory says “look out for young guys blocking traffic” when the reality is that lots of people block traffic. (And, as the number of hasty suburbanites has filled the area, the number of occasions when traffic has been blocked has fallen, so it will not be a problem much longer.)
As to your questions, a little thought on your part should have allowed you to recognize that
it is still far more likely in our culture that young women will have strollers than any other group;
strollers are more likely to block a sidewalk than any other object other than a bike parked sideways, so you may have encountered any number of people talking sports, gardens, politics, or whatever and never noticed them “blocking” the walk, simply because they did not happen to have an object capable of blocking the walk. In other words, everyone is behaving with the same level of inconsiderate actions, but you have focused on the one example that is most likely to irritate you.
Having actually taken the time to think through these scenarios, you could than have realized that the question about hormones was silly from the outset and you would then have recognized that you were seeking a poll of other people’s attitude, not actually a factual answer.
As to how snippy I have been: tough noogies. I learned from the Master who treats poorly thought out questions with a certain condescension that I find amusing.
(Oh, if you have found that most other Mods have been snippy to you, (leaving aside the possibility of a certain tendency toward confirmation bias, already displayed), you might want to consider that that is not a complaint I see regularly lodged against the Moderators, so perhaps there is something in your posting style that brings it out in the best of us.)