BellaOnline Forums Family Moms Ranting: Children Should be Seen and Not Heard???

Okay, most people can tolerate well-behaved children. I'm one of those people. I can appreciate a child who isn't screaming and throwing stuff around. And I really love the children whose parents must have done a bang up job and have excellent manners. I recall a few children that have held open doors for people, said their "pleases" and "thank yous," and I specifically remember this one little girl who was no older than seven who noticed that I had dropped several stacks of cups (this was at my job at the movie theater) and ran over and picked them up for me. I made damn sure that I complimented both her and her mother. And believe me, that little girl made my [censored] day at my job that much better.

BUT:

It is not appropriate to allow your child to misbehave in public, period. Even worse when you do nothing to discourage bad behavior. Not everybody thinks it's cute when little Ashley starts banging the silverware on the table at a restaurant that isn't Chuck-E-Cheese or little Jimmy throws a temper tantrum in the middle of Wal-Mart because Mommy won't buy him the new GI Joe.

I'm especially not too sympathetic when I had to spend the 14 hour flight to Japan listening to two toddlers take turns squalling the entire flight. Now, I'm not an unreasonable person. I understand that the cabin pressure changes are uncomfortable and that a kid won't be too happy during take-off and landing. But having to hear a child screech and wail for 14 hours, effectively screwing me and others out of sleep? And this brings me to another point: I remember flying when I was a kid and my ears hurting horribly from the air pressure changes. That's probably downright torture for a toddler and infant. Why subject them to that?

What's even better is when the kid is doing something that can be dangerous and the parent does nothing. Then when the kid gets hurt or worse, the parent wants to scream lawsuit. There was a recent case in Pennsylvania (I think) where a woman was charged and convicted for not going into dangerous waters when she couldn't swim and save somebody else's child. She was charged because she was previously in proximity of the child and somehow, that meant she was the kid's guardian, despite the fact that she didn't know the kid and despite the fact that she previously pointed out to the kid's father that the kid was going too close into the water and brought the kid back to his father. The father apparently deemed it unimportant to watch his two-year old son, and the kid went into the water and drowned. Now the woman was sentenced to 18-months in prison for somebody else's failure to parent. How that even constitute as justice? It takes a village indeed.

It not only annoys other patrons, but it also doesn't put the parent in a good light either. It just smacks of "I'm too lazy and/or spineless to discipline my children." And if you're the parent of a special needs child who has a tendency to freak out in public, while I understand that's rough, it's not usually obvious that a kid is disabled in any way. It's not for the rest of us to bear the responsibility.

Other people pay for their meal, airplane seat, movie, etc. It's not fair to ask everybody else to ignore the child or otherwise adjust so you don't have to discipline the child. Oh, and just because it says "family restaurant" doesn't mean that it's okay for a child to be loud and obnoxious. There's only one place off the top of my head where a kid pretty much has a mandate to be loud and run around and that's Chuck-E-Cheese (or similar places, depended upon where you are in the world).

And please don't say that we have no idea how hard it is to raise children. Yes, we do. Different experiences have showed us how hard it is to raise children, which is why we've decided to not have them. Not to mention that it's not a valid excuse. My parents raised two children and my mother did it on her own from when I was 13 on. My sister and I have always been well-behaved in public, so it's not an impossibility.

Society has come to the point where there is now a market for several TV shows on different channels on how to deal with misbehaving children. I watch Supernanny and Nanny 911 and what I find so funny is that the nannies on the show aren't teaching anything novel. It's just plain old common sense. Your kid does something good, you reward them. They do something wrong, you punish them. That's the very first thing they teach you in the most basic psychology class. Classical and operational conditioning.

It's not even just the CF who feels this way. Please keep that in mind. My sister plans on having children and she gets more annoyed at misbehaving children and their parents than I do. Ditto for my mother, and she raised me and my sister. Of course, she (and my father when he was still alive) taught my sister and I how to behave in public. Any misbehaving would result in disciplinary action and this was a time when it was still okay to spank your child. (I'm only 20, BTW, so there isn't that large of a gap; this was the late 1980s - early 1990s).

Also keep in mind that yes, there is a fraction of the population that don't like children at all, but this does not make them evil in any sort of way.

The most important point: Those with children made the decision to have children. It is the childed that should and have to make life adjustments. It is not fair to ask others who had no part in the decision to adjust their life for you. Give the child some home-training or invest in a babysitter.

I apologize if this comes across as curt, but I try not to sugarcoat things. And the "you" is in the general terms, not to anybody here specifically.