oK Lets see this form a different angle.
YOu are tired, hungry, or not feeling so good. Maybe you had a bad day over all, you had a fight with your sister, you have a bad hair day, maybe you are PMS.
YOu husband drags you to Home Depot to buy stuff you both need for the house. You get there and you can’t find something you want or your husband tells you the color your picked out is uggly and that he is getting this other one istead.
YOu star crying, he makes you feel even worse by telling you to stop. Can’t he see you are hurting?? Can’t he just be on your side and support you and e there on this hard moment?
Then some stranger cames over and offers you a tea cup from their refreshments center so you can feel better. Your husband says ” NO she is not getting any. She needs to learn to behave when we are out. I do not want her to think that everytime we are out shopping all she needs to do is cry to get a cup of tea. Lets enforce only good behaviour”
What would you think about this man?? Abusive? Controling? Insentive? Disrespectiful of his wife’s feelings??
Why is it that it is OK to treat children like that but not adults? Are children second class citizens? Do they not deserve our respect, compassion and suport?
They are young. They have a lot less tools to be able to handle their emotions.
Treating them like that is not going to teach them compassion. Its going to teach them that mom and dad don’t care about how they feel. Go ahead and stuff your feelings inside. They are not important.
No wonder there are kids that grow up to be drug addicts, alchaholics, emotionaly unavailable and unable to love themselves or feel loved.

As a mom of a two year old I keep stickers in my purse along with a couple finger puppets and a mini harmonica. I pull these out BEFORE my kid is crying/screaming/throwing a fit. When I notice she’s getting tired of being there or fidgety and we ‘justhavetwomoreaislestogo’ I pull these out. I let her play with them and it normally keeps her preoccupied until we get through the checkout. Therefore the crying doesn’t happen. When the crying does happen I don’t take these things away, I simply pick her up out of the cart and give her a big hug and maybe hold her for a while. Because, most of the time, that’s what she wants–attention– which she deserves.

As for getting stickers from other people I let her keep them. It is rude and mean of me to take them away from her. It was a gift from them to her to make her feel better and really, I have no right stepping in. I wouldn’t take something away from my husband if he got something special! Of course these are inedible items. Anything of the food variety gets put through me first. (Fortunately, I’ve never had to go through that yet.)

But finally, I think the biggest difference is how we look at the crying and what the crying means. If we look at it as them ‘wanting to be bad’ and ‘it shouldn’t be rewarded’ then sure, I guess mom’s going to take away that sticker. My daughter honestly doesn’t cry ‘to be bad’ at the store or over things. (Please don’t get me wrong–she does cry to throw fits, just fortunately, not at the grocery store.) So there’s no reason for me to treat it as bad behavior.

Positive reinforcement for good behavior, I say. If that means giving a sticker to her to CONTINUE good behavior (not begging or bribing her, just as a distraction) so be it.

The other question is, “Who is in charge?” Do I need to beg my child to listen to me? Is the kid in charge of the cart/store run? Is mom in charge and setting the boundaries and rules? When the answer is clear that mom is in charge sometimes those lines can be blurred a little. When the kid is in charge, it’s easy to tell in the store. When there is a tentative balance of power, maybe mom needs to stick to her guns and not let her have that sticker..

This said, I don’t interfere with other people’s parenting–especially when they are struggling at the moment. They don’t need that extra authority figure pushed into the situation. Maybe I’ll slip mom the sticker and she can decide what she wants to do with it. All I know, I’ve been grateful when someone has distracted my kid, with a kind word or an item.

As Alex said it is a right-vs-right dilemma. We each have our parenting style. Maybe all that we need to remember is to be a human first, parent (authority figure) after.
Anjali

wow Alex, thanks for the patriarchal flashback when women obeyed men and husbands were the rulers, leaders of a home- WTF?
Dude, seriously- flip the genders next time or piss off.
We’ve had enough- even in jest, even as an analogy to drive a point home-
flip the genders.

Um, folks? Angry “T” person? That other poster named Alex IS a woman. We’re both Alexandras.

I don’t see anything wrong with being kind to an upset child.

I also don’t see anything wrong with saying, “I realize that you’re trying to be helpful, but it’s not the kind of help I want right now.”

I think it’s a really sad thing in our society that people are made to feel like it’s wrong to go out of their way to be nice to other people’s kids. I have sympathy for people who are so hysterically afraid of “stranger danger,” or struggling so hard to control their kid, that a stranger’s kind gesture upsets them greatly. But that’s the adult’s problem, not the kid’s. I’m still going to go on being kind and friendly to kids I don’t know.

Parenting – and being human, for that matter – is such a hard job, as all these comments attest.

And while I appreciate the passion that this post has engendered, I’m uncomfortable with the tone of the responses. I don’t think a brief comment on a post provides enough information for any of us to assign intent or chips or life choices or isms, does it?

It’s so clear (and important and vital) that we each see a different part of reality. If we can inform each other about the reality we see, without using violent language to do so, then there’s hope.

I get what AnnMarie’s saying. I really do. But also, a couple of weeks ago my daughter was throwing a fit in the grocery store, and I was wearing my mean rigid mama blinders and not giving her the patient response she needed to calm down. A woman appeared with a clipboard, paper, and a crayon, asked my daughter if she wanted to take it to color with while we shopped. It knocked us both out of our miserable power struggle, calmed us both down. I was still too embroiled in my grumpiness to really show her gratitude, but, really, she saved us that afternoon.

It takes real bravery to approach parents and kids in public. Many of us parents talk about wanting “a village”, yet when kind people do their best to help, we often shut them out, feeling their involvement as some sort of insult. I want to work on accepting those offers more graciously or, when they are genuinely at odds with a discipline maneuver I’m trying to pull off, declining them in a way that doesn’t scare the giver off from approaching other mamas in public.

Alex, I have to say, I did not find your comments offensive in the least. Yes, it does play in gender stereotypes and maybe that means I’m ‘sexist’ at heart because I wasn’t somehow offended by that. But well, I wasn’t. This has left me with food for thought.

I will say, I am offended at the aggressiveness of T’s responses which I find neither loving, kind or gently corrective. They’ve lost their meaning because of the way they were presented to me. I’m not hearing the words, all I’m seeing is an angry person. T, I’m sure that wasn’t your intention, but well, it has been the outcome for me. Food for thought for you.

Yes, sometimes sexism angers me.
My early years were in a household where mather had to ask permission from father. That comment triggered me.
Please be as gentle and loving as you expect others to be.

Yes, the idea that there are drug addictions and what not because of how the grocery store runs are handled or whatever mom did wrong- upsets me.
There are mothers and fathers, uncles and cousins who were great to a child who grew up to be addicted (and the rest of what was listed up there).

The stranger in line at the grocery store is either fellow human who can help or stranger who means danger- it seems to depend on the culture one’s in and frankly if the person offering help is “other” or not comes into play.