If you don't have kids...

I love reading other blogs, especially ones that get quoted by a major news outlet in an article. The other day I came across a blog I enjoyed and I read 4 pages worth of the writings. Until I came to an entry bashing parents who don't control their children or keep them quiet. This blog author was most likely late 20s by the nature of his writing and obviously not a parent. His blog focused on the restaurant industry.

Now that I've set up the back story, here's what offended me. He's pissed off about people who can't control their children: in restaurants, on airplanes, at the store, in public in general. I understand getting annoyed with unruly children and parents who are doing nothing to stop it, that I get. What this blog author failed to understand is that there is a difference between parents who don't attempt to create order with their children, and times when despite best efforts there's nothing that can be done. If our children get too much to handle at a restaurant, we leave. If they act out in the middle of a shopping trip, we leave. We do something about it whenever we can. I'm not about to let my children run around without supervision or some modicum of control.

But...as in every situation, there is another side...there are times when children don't listen and there's nothing as a parent you can do about it. It's inevitable that as a parent you will someday find yourself in a situation where there is nothing you can do to calm or comfort you child and they throw some sort of fit. For example, our recent trip home from Arizona on the plane. We tried to plan flight times so that Evie and Lex slept a majority of the flight and didn't bother anyone, but the plan back fired on us. Evie was so far past when she should have napped that she screamed inconsolably for 15 mins on the plane before we even took off. It's not like Shaun or I did nothing to try to sooth and quite her, and we couldn't have just gotten up and off the plane for the sake of not subjegating the other passangers to her screams. Is it right to sit and judge a parent in that position? How about being a compassionate passanger and offering to help when you see a parent struggle? The flight attendants on this trip were amazingly helpful and understanding, but I wonder how many other passangers were judging us as this blog author apparently does?

There are other situations where I would also cut the parent of an unruly child some slack as well. Next time you see a screaming, tantrum throwing child in a store with one parent try to consider that perhaps they have limited access to go grocery shopping and this is it. If they took their child and left without finishing the shopping they'd be without food until the next trip to the store. Those kinds of trips to the store happen to me when Shaun is out of town and I'm hauling two kids under 16 months old around with me. Thankfully I haven't had to deal with melt downs during them, but I would need to keep shopping if it happened. It's hard being outside of the situation to really know what's going on. So, what I guess I'm getting at is - unless you've been there, don't judge.

(disclaimer: this does not include parents who do nothing to stop their kids from running around, knocking stuff of shelves, bumping into other people, eating unpaid for food at the grocery store, etc. It's about the parents who do try but are in situations that can't be controlled).