This would be my best WAG, for what little it’s worth. Being considerate of the people around you requires considerable attention. You have to constantly be looking and thinking (consciously or unconsciously) how your actions may be affecting them. Mothers, especially new mothers, have so much of their attention directed toward their offspring, and rightly so, that they have considerably less left over for anyone else.
If the OP’s observation has validity, I think this would explain it, though I don’t have enough experience to opine on whether or not it does have validity.
When I was a new mother, we boarded a plane for a 2 hour flight to NYC with my 3 month old daughter. A woman behind us moaned and groaned when she saw us board, making it very clear that she wasn’t happy. “Oh great. Why do I always get stuck behind infants?” She even asked the stewardess to move her to a new seat. The stewardess explained that the plane was full and she got very huffy.
My daughter slept the entire ride, as I hoped she would when I timed the flight around her usual nap time.
When we were disembarking, my husband and I stood up. The woman said something along the lines of, “Will wonders never cease? I sat behind a baby who didn’t cry the whole way.”
To which I replied, “She was certainly less fussy than you.”
This woman had undoubtedly traveled with plenty of well behaved infants, but she just never noticed them. All mothers are not inconsiderate. Those who are may just be too preoccupied to be attuned to the people around them.
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I understand being a parent and not wanting to be called an “inconsiderate monster.” Of course you get defensive.
But you have to understand it from our perspective. We chose a baby-free lifestyle, and to us, your kids are little better than poorly trained housepets. And by extension, you’re the jerk who owns them.
If I brought a dog into a supermarket and it started howling, would you cut me any slack? No way.
This isn’t neccesarily a childfree vs. parents thing. I don’t have children, but I’d like to someday. I don’t like being nearly rundown in the mall by the moms pushing an SUV-sized stroller, usually with purchases inside it, dragging their squalling two-year-old by the arm. No wonder their kids are always crying, I’d cry too if that was my mom and she was that bitchy all the time.
I think the OP would have to show that those inconsiderate people with the double wide strollers (and I see just as many fathers with those things as mothers) were any less inconsiderate before they had children than after. I don’t think the babies have anything to do with it. People who are self-absorbed and inconsiderate before they become parents simply continue to be self-absorbed and inconsiderate after they reproduce.
For the record, I have two small children and I hate those strollers too. Never use the things.
I think that there is also some new sort of motherhood cult in the offing. Not a real cult, of course, but some cultural thing. Maybe a backlash against men wanting equal rights, who knows. I got stuck into going to some relative’s ‘grandparenting’ class, and the only thing I can remember is that a pregnant woman was there, and the instructor called her ‘the boss.’ The rest of the class was equally irrelevant.
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I suspect it’s an equipment issue as well. Back in the late Eighties, when my two were little, stroller’s were much more compact. Personally, I couldn’t wait for them to sit up well enough to ditch the “big” stroller and get into an umbrella stroller. Even the regular strollers had about six inch wheels and maybe an eighteen or twenty inch width. They folded almost flat.
Now they’ve got out strollers the size of small cars. I could stash a couple of kids, two diaper bags and the dog in one of those behemoths! I bet they’re a pig to move too. I can certainly see why an already tired new mom wouldn’t want to haul one of 'em aside for a pedestrian.
There’s also the "OMG, An Adult! " factor. When I was cooped up with the kids all day, I’d have been so delighted to run into a real, live, adult friend that I wouldn’t have noticed a parade trying to get by.
I’d like to add - as a mother of four - that although you do get a bit used to broken sleep, when a subsequent child comes along, you literally start over from scratch. You’re just as exhausted, just as foggybrained…I made some decisions when my youngest was tiny that absolutely apall me in retrospect, but they seemed to make sense at the time. And yes. I remember very little of any of my childrens’ 1st year or two. I was too sleep deprived to store anything in memory.
As for the people who block traffic, there is such a thing as gasp communication. You tap the woman lightly on the arm or shoulder, and you say politely, “Excuse me, ma’am, could you kindly move your stroller out of the path? People are having a hard time getting through.” And she will look horrified and probably do her best to accommodate you. But as you do not speak up, but prefer to seeth hatred at her in silence, she is blearily unaware…and you bear half the fault.
Anyways, as most have already posted, it’s indeed 75% confirmation bias. Though I’ll be the first one to state that new, typically young, mothers can be a real nightmare. Don’t even get me started on the misery that is working in a office as a single male, but I digress. The point is, there’s probably a 100% varied reasons for it. Setting aside the fact that it’s obviously not all mothers, I will agree that it’s a disportionately large number of them as compared to the average population. The reasons I’d assume are as follows:
These women were self-absorbed and inconsiderate long before they were mothers. The kid with a will of it’s own and extra crap that goes along with it just make them more noticable and encumbering to the rest of us.
They are exceedingly tired, as already discussed, making them less attentive to detail and unwilling to put that extra effort to accomodate others proactively.
Having firsthand knowledge of the subset of people you’re refering to, I’m guessing there’s a certain amount of a sense of entitlement due to their upper-crust lifestyle. This may or may not be part of reason #1 listed. The giant SUV, the giant status-symbol-as-stroller, the manicured nails and $500 shoes, etc. are just part of the equation which makes them issuferable on occasion.
The cultural trand towards treating mothers, and small children, as the finest and most hallowed people on the planet plays a role. Many people, especially those close to large numbers of mothers (often with a financial interest), develop a certain empathy and praise for them. Typically putting them ahead of all others for special treatment. Airlines offer parents with small children special privledges as will restaruants and many businesses. All of this can have a cumulative effect causing those mothers to expect it all the time from people with nothing to gain from doing so. They might forget that they don’t happen to be at a moms-and-me event at that particular occasion.
Hormones. I’m not a doctor and the “hormone” card gets played often when it shouldn’t, but I wager there’s a certain amount of truth to it. With port-partum depression and all the other stuff going on with mothers and some women in general, I’d suppose it’s not totally fictional. Maybe they are needlessly territorial and protective as a result. Tough to discuss with anything aside from presumptions though.
Time. Mothers, especially working moms, are liable to be pressed for time. Or at least the believe they are. Taking kids anywhere can be a production, what with carrying toys, diaper bags, food, etc. and I have little doubt that what takes you and I 15 minutes might take them 45. Combine with the fact that kids will make holding to a schedule especially difficult you can guess these mothers have a tendancy to always feel rushed and a need to cut corners to get her errends done. This may often be at the expense of acting in the interests of people around them. If it takes them an extra 45 seconds to push the stroller out of the whne feeding the meter they might be more apt to not do it than they otherwise would.
Oh, and lastly, chicks are insane.
tomndebb, incidentally, I’d say that there’s is certainly an increasing trend towards mods being especially snippy and condecending when doing their duties. Every couple months there’s a bruhaha in the pit over just that. That’s not to say that I disagree with you here, and if you’re channelling your inner Cecil have at it, but it’s a little misleading to say that this observation was especially off base.
Those mothers are certainly no worse than the idiots (male and female) who put a shopping cart in the middle of the aisle at supermarkets and then bend over and take up the whole aisle while reading the contents of a can of peas.
That said, I was recently pissed off at a young couple who took their screaming brat (my guess is, about one year old) to a local, upscale restaurant. That child screamed and cried and threw a holy fit for the entire time they were there. I can understand if we were in McDonald’s or Burger King, but if you can afford to eat at an upscale restaurant, you can damn well afford a babysitter. And from the parents’ nervous glances around the restaurant, you knew they were aware their kid was driving everyone else nuts.
Some people really do think the world revolves around them…be it parents with newborns, idiots in supermarkets, or people who stand in doorways to chat…has nothing to do with hormones…just rude assholes on the loose.
For fucks sake! Did you read what you wrote? You may have chosen a “baby-free” lifestyle but you didn’t choose a baby-free planet on which to have that lifestyle.
To me people who whine about people who have not yet learnt the rules of society (AKA children) are people who just like whining.
YES! YES! YES! It is a parents job to teach their offspring how society works; where they can make odd childish noises and where they can’t, where they can behave in spontaneous childish ways and where they can’t, places that are appropriate for them to be and places that are not. These are important things to learn but a baby doesn’t know them and the mum is probably getting to grips with the scenario. Have you ever stopped and chatted on the footpath? Yes? You inconsiderate a-hole. The only difference between you and the mum was the pushchair.
Once upon a time you were one of those “poorly trained housepets”. You undoubtly annoyed the living shit out of many people. Your mother received scathing looks at the supermarket when you chucked a tanty because you didn’t get the shiney, sparkly, choccy thing you wanted. Your mother probably stood in a doorway with you in a pram. You probably did inappropriate things at inappropriate moments. That is how babies/kids learn what is inappropriate.
Get a grip! You may have decided to be childless BUT the planet didn’t. Get over yourself. I am not the mother of a baby, rather the mother of a teenager but YOUR sense of entitlement seems far worse then most mothers…you had to move past a pushchair on the footpath? THE HORROR!
Mothers are doing what they need to do. Mothers are people. Some people are unfailingly polite in all their interactions, some are rude. If you meet a rude mother you have met a rude person. They would be no less rude if they chose the childless route.
I very much agree with both zoogirl’s and dmark’s observations.
And Punditlisa, that was a good story.
Back in the early 80’s when I and other Boomers began having children, it was as if we were the first humans who ever gave birth. There was a lot of accessorizing going on, but like zoogirl I couldn’t wait to “graduate” to the smaller umbrella stroller. These days it looks like equipment needs have increased over the years. Today’s monster strollers out on the sidewalks do fall in with the SUV lifestyle. It’s as if the kid has to be in a traveling crib. What happened to Snuglis?
This is not a hormone issue. As others have said, these are parents, both men and women, who were already self-absorbed and inconsiderate.
I love it! And it expresses so much of what adults do on a daily basis as well…hee.
I see no reason to not be assertive in this scenario. I’ve had sidewalks blocked by LARGE dogs. Sitting nicely while their owner chats away, oblivious. But the dog is so damned BIG…senseless, inconsiderate people for having large domestic pets! There oughta be a law…or maybe I speak up and say, is your dog OK with me going by with my small children? And dog owner will move dog, tell me he is really a pussycat (that one always puzzled me, btw) and we can all smile and be on our way.
Perhaps we could colonize Mars and send all young human offspring there to be raised–and once they can drive, they can all come back. Would that help?
I do have some sympathy for the OP–there does indeed seem to be an aura of entitlement with SOME moms. And a busy urban sidewalk is not a place I would want to park my stroller, for any length of time. But, as has been said–this is confirmation bias and an amazingly furious response to a minor matter. What happens if you get a parking ticket? :eek:
Bag the hormone thing–or are you one of the first when a baby dies to condemn the mother for not being attentive enough etc? :rolleyes:
There is an astounding sense of entitlement by all sorts of people. Moms - yep. The guy at the airport who wanted to bring on three carryons - one too large to even be a carryon - yep. The young man stopped next to me at the stoplight who thinks his taste in music is something I’d enjoy and feels the need to blare it with the bass turned up so high that my car throbs - yep. I can pick on people of every race, class, age and religion to show examples of entitlement.
Mostly, I like the kids and moms. There are tons in my nieghborhood.
Some, however, seem astoundingly BLIND to courtesy towards other adults when their kids are around.
If I’m having a conversation with Mom and the kid starts going, “mommy, mommy, mommy” this seems to be handled in two ways. . .
“Just a minute, Timmy, I’m having a conversation.” This is typically followed by me saying, “no no, go ahead,” or the mom waiting until a natural pause in the conversation to attend to whatever the child wants.
“Oh, what is it Timmmy, are you OK? Do you need something?” ::mother mother mother:: Never returns to the conversation.
I’m not a parent myself, but I don’t think it’s over-extending to call the second behavior astoundingly rude.
I kind of have a rock garden at my place (it has los of small stones along with larger ones). The local kids like to play in it. Sometimes the kids walk out of it with handfuls of rocks. Most moms tell their kids to put the rocks back, or actually take the rocks from the kids and put them back themselves.
There’s a mom (now out of the 'hood) who used to tell her kids – mind you, this is with me sitting right there on my steps – “just take one.” :eek: She’d come by every day.
Some of these moms. . .they get their kid around and the rest of the world just disappears. It changes their brainwaves.
If you want a baby free life style then you are welcome to it, inside the four walls of your own house. When you go out, you go out in to THE WORLD, and THE WORLD contains BABIES. Don’t like it? Then FUCK OFF!
No it doesn’t, really, truly, honestly! If they are rude, inconsiderate twats WITH children they were rude inconsiderate twats BEFORE children.
I work with children everyday. Some mothers are rude bitches who need shot, some mothers are lovely. The rude bitches are just that…RUDE BITCHES. If I believed in god I would say god save the children of rude bitches because they need to be saved! Saved FROM their obnoxious mothers! The rest of the world may gain something from that but really it isn’t about them is it? Parents get to make you or break you…random strangers on he footpath just get to whinge.
Giving birth does not make a new personality though it can intensify an unpleasant one.