I once had neighbors that had shrieking kids. They shrieked while they played. Constantly. Not just “oh, now you’re gonna lose at tag! OHHHH NOOO!”…
More like “AHAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAA!!!” “HHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAA”
“AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH”
And they babysat other kids, though the others weren’t as loud. The parents sat on the porch and watched on occasion… more often they let the older one (6 or 7 years old) watch the other three.
I once saw a cop there but nothing ever happened.
I asked them once while walking past their house if everything was alright because I’d heard some screaming a few minutes before. HINT HINT.
Eventually I yelled out the window for the brats to shut up while their parents were outside.
I’m still trying to work out why you thought was “the ghetto people” were in the wrong, babies cry…it’s how they communicate (yes it’s a dreadful noise but they don’t really have an option as far as communication goes). Actual adults who make comments like “shut that thing up” after TWO minutes are clearly the ones with a problem.
If you think that means I’m soft on bad behaviour or tantrums then you would be wrong. I have a 16 yr old one who threw one, yes ONE super duper tanty in the supermarket. I abandonned the trolley mid aisle and left, took him home and I gave him VERY stern words (no he has never ever had a single smack), I made it quite clear that performing like that was a certain route to never getting anything he wanted. Don’t get me wrong we would get the lip, the start of the weep and then I would remind him if he kept going we would be leaving. But there was never ever a single tanty after that first one.
It’s not BAD parenting that causes continued tantys but it is “easy way out” parenting that causes tantys.
To the OP, I’m a pre-school teacher, I hear VERY loud children all day long. I spend every day with 45-ish 3-5 yr olds everyday. Many will cry when they hurt themselves, some will cry loudly but there are 3 children who will squeal like stuck pigs several times everyday. All three are lovely kids but all three have parents who PANDER TO THE SCREECHING and so the screeching goes on. The goal is to lessen the screeching but as long as it makes mum or dad jump (and it does) it’s a bloody hard goal to reach.
People with babies are not allowed in libararies? Yes continued baby wailing would send any sensible parent out the door for a breather but after TWO minutes? Jeez it’s a BABY! They can’t exactly explain things in any other terms. You think people with babies should be banned from libraries in case the baby should happen to cry?
No, people with crying babies should go outside until the baby isn’t crying, same as if they were the ones making noise by talking above a low murmur with friends, or making a phone call.
Screaming has no place in a library, regardless of who is doing it. Furthermore, babies cry because they are tired, hungry, need changed, need attention, etc. A good parent should stop surfing the Web and go attend to the baby’s needs.
The most recent time was Monday while shopping at Target. Not just an isolated shriek, but ongoing shrieky crying and parents who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave the store with the child. Hey, it was a weekday (sort of, a government holiday) and maybe the mom had to get her shopping done. I put on my iPod.
I don’t usually see kids acting up too badly in restaurants. The last time I can remember was quite a few months ago in Olive Garden when some 6-10 year old little girls must have gotten permission to leave the table and go to the restroom together, and were cutting up and running through the serving area on their way.
My experience was my own child (19 months old), about 1 month ago in Old Navy.
We first went to Walmart and she was fine in the seat of the cart–saying Hi to people and pointing to things and smiling. Then I had one quick stop to make next door at Old Navy. I just had to exchange a shirt I bought with an identical one, just at a different Old Navy store that was set up differently than the one I bought the shirt.
I didn’t want to get the stroller out just for (what I thought was) a quick in/out, so I carried her. BIG MISTAKE!! As soon as I stopped walking for any reason, she flipped out. She didn’t want to be carried for any reason. So I put her down to wander with me. That didn’t work because she was chasing a cute little boy her age, going in the opposite direction.
So I gave up trying to find the shirt I needed and picked her up to leave. She screamed and twisted and contorted herself in my arms so violently that people were looking at me like I was abducting her! It was awful. She continued screaming and twisting in my arms through the parking lot and at that point, I couldn’t put her down in the lot or else she’d either drop to the pavement in a grand mal tantrum or run off. So I tried to get my keys out of my pocket while trying not to drop her.
That. Was. Horrible. You can’t reason with a 19 month old and it’s very frustrating to both the parents and the child. You just have to take them out of the situation.
I still refer to that as the Category 5 tantrum. She really can be a sweet child, but wow, her mood can turn on a dime.
I’ve just put May 12, 2010 in my Outlook calendar “Ask askeptic how his 2 year old is”.
We heard a few screaming kids at the waiting area of the airport a couple weeks ago. We were trying to guess where they were headed, fearful they’d be seated right behind us.
Luckily, none were screaming with a Chicago accent. “Deez teeth are killin’ me!”
I’ve just been checking in to see if there were any Dopers in Wal-Mart the night my kid had a total and complete meltdown. He saw the bikes. He wanted a bike. I tried distraction. I tried reason. I tried bribing. I had to have milk for the night and next morning.
So, I stood in the checkout line at Wal-Mart for what must have been 10 solid minutes with a shreiking 2 year old repeating “I want a bike! I want a bike!” My 6 year old walked a little bit away from me and pretended not to know me. I fought tears. I counted how many check out counters each way people were looking at me (6 to the left, 8 to the right if you are wondering).
It was humiliating.
When I got to the car I promptly pulled out my phone and called my mother and apologized for every public fit I ever threw. She laughed in my face - I think it was a good moment for her.
Every time my husband and I go out for a nice meal…which is often. We seem to have a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time when it comes to out of control children. Come to think of it, if there’s any person behaving badly within a mile of us, we somehow manage to get to the eye of the storm sometimes.
If the screaming in the store goes on long enough, I’ve been known to shout, “Give it what it wants!” Just to see if anybody cares. Sometimes people laugh, sometimes there’s crickets. I’m firmly in the camp of getting the troublemaker outside in a reasonable amount of time so as not to disturb the rest of the world. Babies cry, yes. That’s absolutely true. But not being able to put up with that noise is one reason I didn’t have any. I certainly didn’t ask to be aurally assaulted by yours.
I eat out a lot too, in places like Applebee’s and Chili’s, and I pretty much never encounter screaming kids. I do sometimes see a kid looking (staring) at me over the back of the booth.
Maybe the screaming thing is a phenomena most common in nice restaraunts? I wonder if middle lower income people have better parenting skills.
I think you’re just lucky. My best grad school buddy just quit her job as a hostess at Applebee’s after five years. She says that every single freaking night, families came in to her restaurant with screaming children who ran around and threw food. She says that virtually all of those parents tipped below 10%, despite demanding an inordinate amount of the servers’ time and leaving the area around their tables a total disaster.
Basically every Applebee’s I’ve ever been in has been like that.
People using the computers in this library complain just as loudly to fellow patrons when their music is on too loud or they’re cursing a lot. Is it really so difficult to understand that some people come to the library to do things that require quiet and concentration and do not want to be interrupted by the loud noises of anyone who’s disrupting their quiet environment? (They also put the children’s section in a separate room on a different floor to keep it quieter, so it’s not just the patrons who’d like to keep some areas of the library relatively quiet.)
It’s really not a matter of banning parents and babies from libraries, but a matter of the parent using some common sense in certain venues. It’s just as inappropriate to loudly disrupt a theater event as it is to not escort out a loud and upset child from a designated quiet area of a library until the noise issue is under control. These people were being a lot more polite than I’ve seen some university students react to large amounts of noise during finals week in the university library; people have a low tolerance for lots of noise when they’re in an environment that’s not supposed to be noisy.
Lastly, there were two individuals who could have taken the baby out while the other continued the business of whatever they were doing on the internet. The fact that neither of them moved to do anything and continued staring at the computer until people complained enough was the issue. I really don’t think that they had a valid excuse for either of them ignoring their child until other people complained to the point where they were being heckled as they left.
I can not promise, but I’m presuming my daughter was one of the culprits mentioned in this thread. You see, she just turned two. About ever 2 weeks she finds a new, mind numbing, skin crawling, eye stabbing shriek. Fortunately for me, her favorite thing to do is lay down in random places, quietly. However, at the grocery store Wednesday, we waited outside for about 15 minutes for her to cool down and she made it most of the way through the trip reasonably peaceful.
However, when I had to go to the manager to fix an error on check out…the shriek occurred. Damn…almost made it out alive.
By the same token, I went into a shop the other day with her and they had a flight of yellowish orange stairs just as you walk in. She took one look at the stairs and just FREAKED out. I took her out immediately. Waited a while…tried again…no luck…tried once more…nope, we went home. Strangely, we went to another shop 5 minutes later and she was fine as she had been in the previous places. We think she has a yellowish-orange phobia. She refuses to let Mac & Cheese anywhere near her.
I do try to contain her and take her places when she is feeling froggy, but sometimes, shit happens. We do not in any way reward her for this behavior and have seen an improvement lately, but it still happens.
I love the kid who looks over the back of the booth! I simply have to chat 'em up. As long as they’re not being horrible, I think its ok (restaurant appropriate, of course).
I was in Two Boots one time and was trying to act like a New Yorker, ignoring the kid who kept looking over the booth and who finally dropped a piece of paper over the side. “It’s you,” he said. It was an excellent crayon drawing of me, and I still have it framed in my house.
I know I’m on dangerous ground here, but I simply cannot believe that every single night families come in with screaming, running around, food throwing kids. Especially the food throwing thing. I’ve eaten in many restaurants for many years and all over the place (many, many cities) and have occasionally but rarely seen this kind of behavior. Except for the food throwing. Never seen that. I’ve seen some food dropped or drinks spilled, but not thrown. Is your buddy talking about babies in highchairs dropping food? Applebee’s invites that. So do many family restaurants. Carrow’s, Denny’s, Mc Donald’s, they all do.
I’ve heard groups of adults get into pretty loud discussions, and laughter, and heard the kids join in. Is that what you mean?
I’m really trying to understand what some people are complaining about.
