I don’t think wanting to know if my four month old bumps her head or gets a rash (after which my reaction may be “OMG get to the hospital,” or “Oh no worries, that happens all the time”) counts as being a helicopter parent.
In the past, I think the standard solution was that dad went out with his buddies whole mom stayed home. Fuck that. Cell phones have made balancing kids, work and life a million times more possible.
Sure you want to know. But do you NEED to have your movie interrupted (as well as everyone else) or can it wait an hour? If it’s ER time, then Grandmother can handle it, no? or, it’s not an emergency. Right? So- either it is a ER emergency, in which case it can’t wait until you take the call, get to the car, drive home, etc- or it’s not a ER emergency, in which case it can wait an hour.
While sometimes true (Dad had bowling nite) both my Mom and Dad went out together, leaving me with a sitter/relative/etc. Even when they went to Vegas for several days, for example.
ERs around here would never treat a child without a parent there, unless they have asthma or are bleeding out. Broken arm? That won’t even get you to the head of the line.
It would get the baby-sitter a lot of attention, though.
There is a whole range of events that are not life-threatening emergencies, but that I would still like to be aware of or able to advise on. Furthermore, if for some reason there is an ER emergency, parents need to be there to advocate for their child, not watching the last hour of the Hobbit in utter ignorance while their child is fighting for their life. Could you even imagine how you’d live with yourself is something serious happened and you were out on the town, completely unaware, for hours?
I’ve never been disrupted in a theater by my babysitter, but if I was you can bet I’d be running out of the theater to answer the call.
Not so much a matter of trust or not trust, but why not try looking at it as cost / benefit?
What is the “cost” (in terms of enjoyment) to the other patrons of an emergency call, and what is the benefit to the parent?
I don’t know about anyone else, but if the mummy or daddy in the seat next to me has that sort of emergency and excuse themselves past me, I am not in the least upset - infact I would be happy that they were contactable and able to go help their kids
Around here, we have volunteer fire depts. Our PD has officers assigned to SWAT team, our Sheriff Dept has deputies assigned to bomb squad. Some people are on on an organ transplant list. I know people in all of these categories. Granted all of these people are probably heading for the door before looking at the details if their pager goes off but why shouldn’t they be allowed to have a little fun instead of waiting for the call that may very well not come.
I don’t think that’s at all true. Parents have had date night since forever. I used to babysit for a ton of different families while the parents went out to movies before people (commonly) had cell phones, and so did a million other teenage girls. Some would call and check in at some point if they were going to be out for maybe 4+ hours. But they could certainly go an hour and a half without being reachable.
It seems the people in this thread demanding the right to use cellphones in movie theaters could get by with having them set to vibrate and then removing themselves to the lobby to check on it. And I can understand this if there’s a good chance that someone may call – organ transplant, doctor’s emergency – but the argument that some sort of vague emergency – child going to emergency room for the first time in their five or six years, pirates attacking a ship off Somalia, deadly asteroid about to hit Earth – could conceivably happen is bizarre.
Absolutely. Babysitters were given a list of emergency numbers and the places the parents would be at.
If a theater blocked radio waves with metalized paint would the people who need their phones at all times still go?
Because it’s going to be less intrusive for the theater to find an usher to track me down or make a general theater-wide announcement asking me for me in the event of an emergency? Loudspeakers saying “Will X please contact the service desk” used to be common in public places. Now, thankfully, we can just directly get ahold of each other.
I’d go to a theater that wasn’t ridicuous. If they all did it, I don’t know what I’d do. Maybe take the baby with me? =D
Seriously, though, I’d probably have to cross theaters off the date night list, and only to to them when my spouse could watch kiddo.
so a movie house with a large number of theaters in it could divide up between quiet, phone-accessible, and chatty talkers.
And as someone who babysat in the pre-cellphone days and DID have an emergency situation arise which necessitated making urgent phone calls, I can tell you first-hand what an utter pain in the ass it was having to make multiple calls over a half-hour period in order to contact first the kids’ parents and then my own. (I was the one who needed to go to the hospital in that case, not the kids I was watching). Today in the same situation two calls, made in the span of five minutes, would do the same job. (And as Sven points out, with less disruption to other non-involved parties - no need to interrupt the movie and make a loudspeaker announcement, or do an overhead page at the shopping mall.)
But see…
We’re talking about the difference between reasonable and unreasonable people here.
The reasonable person absolutely recognises that very few things are answer the call right fucking now emergencies and will take the call outside, just as the reasonable person recognises that maybe a call is important, and it doesn’t annoy them to have somebody leave the theatre to take a call.
The unresasonable person however, believes that it is their god given right to have a 15 minute conversation on where we should go for dinner in the middle of a movie, and everyone else should shut the fuck up, and the unreasonable person also believes that nothing short of the president having to give the nuclear launch codes is a good enough reason to interrupt a movie.
If everybody is reasonable - nothing needs to be done.
If we tend towards the unreasonable, then we’re back to the days of inconvenience.
it’s a weak question. those two don’t mix anyway. if you’re afraid of emergencies and don’t know how to put your phone on ‘silent’, then watch movies at home.
On my phone I can still listen to stuff with the display turned off. And in Australia we have pockets.
Of course- :smack: you’re marsupials, right? 
Yes, and that’s the point. A kid maybe goes to the ER once in his childhood. What the message is going to be is not “Timmy fell in the well” but “Timmy wants another juicebox”. But Helicopter parents feel that’s urgent too. :rolleyes:
But Ok, I’ll make all you guys with once in a decade super duper emergencies a deal. You can have your cell phone on. If it goes off (even silently with text) and you answer in in the theater, a usher comes over with a gift certificate and a hammer. If Timmy has fallen in the well- you get two free passes, popcorn, etc. If it’s the juicebox, then the usher smashes your cell with the hammer.
Deal?
You see- I know texters. They can’t help but answer each and every text no matter how inane. It’s a addiction.
Great. I’ll be in the theater with the metal wall paint that prevents calls and you can be in the phone tethered theater.