don’t write much about raising children because I don’t have children and parents really hate it when child-free people try to tell them how to raise their tiny humans. That’s fair enough. However I do think that as an adult who lives in a world with children, has taught many children, is related to lots of children and regularly comes in to contact with children, I’ve earned the right to add my two cents worth into the advice pool of general parenting. Just because I’ve never been a parent doesn’t mean I can’t see when people are sucking at it. Much like running a country. I’ve never done it myself but I’m very aware of when someone is doing a balls up job of it.
My pearl of wisdom for today is this: Stop allowing your child to be an asshole.
I was in a food court recently waiting at a table for my partner to bring over the food we’d just ordered. I was sitting at a two person table, saving the empty chair for my partner. A big bustling family came along to the table next to mine and one of the young boys aged about ten or eleven, grabbed my spare chair to take to his table.
I said ‘Excuse me, but I need that chair.’
He shrugged his shoulders and carried it over to his table.
I said louder towards the adults at the table ‘Excuse me, I need that chair he took.’
They looked at me like I was a piece of shit on the bottom of their shoes. One lady, presumably this kid’s mother said ‘So?’ and went back to ignoring me.
I very rarely judge people on the way they parent their kids because I rarely know the full story. I used to teach special needs kids and I know that some situations aren’t what they seem. I know that there are differently abled kids out there that require information to be presented to them in ways that mainstream people might not understand. I’ve taught some incredibly unusual students in my time but I never met one kid who couldn’t be taught not to be a jerk. I was fucking appalled at the reaction of this child’s parent.
Essentially this mother (and presumably the child’s father) are teaching this kid to be a douche bag. They’re teaching him that it’s okay to push in front of other people at the supermarket. That it’s okay to damage another person’s car and not leave a note. That if he wants something, he should just take it. On that day, that mother taught her son that he was more important than everyone else in that food court. She taught him to be a dickhead and it was awful to watch.
I don’t care if she was having a shitty day or if she reprimanded him later. The correct course of action would have been to apologise to me, ask him to return the chair and instruct him to get one from an empty table of which there were plenty in the near vicinity. Not only did she allow him to treat me badly, she also treated me badly in front of him. She allowed the disrespectful behaviour and then reinforced it with her own.
People can parent their kids any way they like – if they want to be a tiger parent, helicopter parent or ridiculously laid-back parent that’s fine. It has no impact on me at all but it is inexcusable to allow a child to treat other people badly. Teaching a child to be disrespectful is a habit that can’t be broken.
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Have you ever had an experience like this? A total WTF moment where you can’t quite believe what just happened?
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Keen to read more opinion pieces about things that probably piss you off? Follow Smaggle on Facebook. I’m a staunch gay rights supporter and I write a lot of rants about inconsiderate people and the challenges that come with doing number 2s in public toilets.