Well…another week…another entry about bad parents getting on my nerves.
Maybe it’s not so much that some parents don’t have parenting skills, but that they don’t seem to understand their responsibilities to their kids and society as a whole. They have this idea in their heads of what “kids will be kids” means, and if it’s the wrong one – and I think it is – they never know it and will ignore anyone who tries to educate them about the proper way for kids to behave during certain situations.
I was reading an article awhile back about this woman in England who had apparently spent several weeks apologizing for her kids being so noisy – everywhere they went. And she was upset because none of the adults her kids came in contact with seemed even the slightest bit tolerant of her kids.
And I’m thinking…well, just how tolerant do you expect these adults to be?
I mean, when you describe your own children with a myriad of adjectives that describe noise and chaos…it sort of makes me wonder if they even know the definition of “inside voices.”
That’s the thing – young kids need to be taught the difference between outside voices and situations where they can yell and scream all they want. There are no walls outside, so there are no echoes of those shrill little voices just searing into your brain. And then there’s the inside voices, which kids – and adults for that matter – are supposed to use when they are inside and around other people who should not have to be bombarded with a “wall of noise.” Oh, and that’s just one description the author gave of her children entering a room. Wall. Of. Noise.
As a fellow parent I’m not looking for an apology for noisy children – I’m looking for less noisy children in spaces where noise is not really appropriate. I have children too, so yes, I’m speaking from experience.
Maybe it’s not so much that people are intolerant of children in general (the author’s claim), but just HERS. She even said herself: “Others who are less charitable might say they are, well, just loud! As they battle to be heard over one another – the noise level often escalates to multi-decibel levels.”
Multi-decibel levels? Something she is apparently used to with her own kids and may very well be able to ignore – yet she blames other people for looking askance at them and their “wall of noise?”
I don’t think this woman needs to apologize all of the time to complete strangers for her kids being noisy. Instead, I think maybe…perhaps… a novel idea, I know, but…she could actually just control her kids in the first place.
If they’re galloping through an airport singing at the top of their lungs causing EVERYONE to look at them, then there is definitely something wrong. It’s not that everyone else is intolerant. It’s the kids.
The whole point of the article was that this woman had gotten tired of apologizing for her kids. BUT she wasn’t going to teach them manners or respect for others or “inside voices.” She was just going to let her kids be kids. In other words, allow them to continue to run roughshod over the personal space of others, bombard the public with their wall of noise, and completely disregard the discomfort of everyone around them.
Frankly, it’s lazy parenting. And it’s not fair to the rest of us who have to put up with them.
There is a time and a place for roughhousing and loud behavior. An airport, a doctor’s office, an airplane (all scenarios in the author’s article) and many other shared public places are NOT IT. Whatever happened to teaching inside voices, respecting others, and plain old manners?