Parenting sure ain’t what it used to be

By Randa Wagner –

A cou­ple of weeks ago I noticed a dis­turb­ing trend that might seem insignif­cant to younger folks but sig­nals a big change in fam­ily val­ues to we ‘oldsters.’

I was leav­ing the office at the end of the day through the back door and started walk­ing toward the rear park­ing lot. I saw a woman get out of her vehi­cle with her purse and a child got out of the passenger’s door. She locked the car and walked across the alley toward a build­ing adja­cent to the news­pa­per office. The child, who looked to be about four or five years old, had a frozen treat in his hand and was trot­ting to try to catch up to his mother. The mother was fuss­ing with her purse and cell­phone and never once looked back after she got out of the car. She didn’t check alley traf­fic, she didn’t check on the child; it was as if she were alone. The kid was, obvi­ously, on his own. It was up to him to get across the alley safely and hope­fully get inside the building’s door before his mother let the door close on him.

The week before that I saw a young father with three chil­dren in tow walk­ing east on the side­walk on the square in Mt. Gilead. He was push­ing the youngest child in a stroller and the other two chil­dren, both under age 5 or 6, were trail­ing along behind at their own pace. He did not look back to check on them, he just kept walk­ing ahead.

More and more often now, I have noticed a lack of con­cern on the part of par­ents for the well-being of their chil­dren. I sure wasn’t a model mom, but I didn’t put myself on the inside lane of the side­walk while my kids were left to walk inches away from mov­ing traf­fic. I didn’t walk ahead of them and not look back to check on them. I didn’t let them walk in the street when there was a side­walk avail­able, and I made them stay right with me in a crosswalk.

I didn’t swear at them in the store when they acted up and, if they got on a cry­ing jag and wouldn’t stop, we left the store (and I pad­dled their behinds). We didn’t stay in the store and con­tinue shop­ping, hop­ing the child would stop scream­ing if I ignored the tantrum. I’ve seen moth­ers walk away with their carts, call­ing back, “Ok, I guess you’re just not going to get your sur­prise since you can’t behave,” while the child reacts by scream­ing louder and pitch­ing them­selves to the floor in front of me. Once, no mat­ter how I tried to get around a small boy cry­ing hys­ter­i­cally and writhing on the tile floor, he always rolled in the direc­tion I was try­ing to go. The mother con­tin­ued on down the aisle as if noth­ing were hap­pen­ing, so the child would get up long enough to throw him­self a lit­tle far­ther along toward her, work­ing his way down the aisle. It was ridicu­lous! I ended up back­ing up and going clear around another direc­tion to get back to almost the same spot.

Store man­agers should be per­mit­ted to ask these peo­ple to leave the store. They won’t, of course. It isn’t ‘polit­i­cally cor­rect’ and the offender just might be ‘offended’ by hav­ing even more atten­tion drawn to them. Heaven for­bid some lazy, irre­spon­si­ble par­ent might have to super­vise their own offspring.

There’s a fine line between cor­po­ral pun­ish­ment and child abuse. The minute we got out of line in pub­lic, we got one warn­ing from my dad. If we were fool­ish enough to ignore it, we got grabbed firmly by the arm and made to walk next to him or we got the back of his hand and a stern, “I told you to knock it off!” That almost always ended it, because reper­cus­sions at home were harsher. Guess what? Cor­po­ral pun­shi­ment didn’t kill us or turn us into child or wife beat­ers. Sure it was embarass­ing, but not enough to make us want to mur­der our par­ents in their sleep, for heaven’s sake.

I don’t think peo­ple think about how harsh their words come across to kids, either. I’ve heard par­ents swear a blue streak at their kids, then smack the kid for swear­ing at their sib­ling. Years ago I heard a grand­mother in a store in Penn­syl­va­nia snarling at two lit­tle girls try­ing to eat their Happy Meals while she wailed about “hav­ing to take care of you two lit­tle brats on my day off. My God, I don’t believe I have to do this! Your mother is worth­less! I hope you choke on those Happy Meals I had to pay for! Hurry up! I don’t want to be here all day! Can’t you hurry up?” She was car­ry­ing on like she had a spear through her side and was in incred­i­ble agony. I felt so sorry for the two lit­tle girls, who were try­ing to eat but were so shaken up they were hav­ing a hard time. All this, in front of a large crowd eat­ing around them. The older girl hummed ner­vously and looked at her box, pre­tend­ing to read it, and it made the old woman even angrier. I wanted to say some­thing to the grand­mother but knew I was the one who would prob­a­bly end up in jail for induc­ing a riot.

I real­ize most of us who exist on the earth today were not ‘planned’ by our par­ents. ­We were born as a result of an inti­mate act, plain and sim­ple. Years ago it hap­pened more often because birth con­trol was not as sophis­ti­cated or avail­able as it is now. If you got mar­ried before 1970, chances were pretty darn good you were gonna have kids — and lots of them. Mar­riage was a cal­cu­lated risk in that respect: you knew if you had sex, you were going to have babies, and you had to take care of them. Even when you were out of work, even when you were tired, even when you were depressed. They were your respon­si­bil­ity to raise, teach right from wrong, and guide in the right direction.

My folks had it pretty tough some­times and I’m sure they wished, more than once, they didn’t have so many kids. My mother was eter­nally tired and my dad felt over­whelmed some­times. We were dis­ci­plined when we needed it and, even when they were very angry with us, we were never called vul­gar names, sworn at, told we were worth­less or ‘wish you’d never been born.’ We were pretty darn poor some­times but had hot meals, clean clothes, and struc­ture in our lives. Kids need that to feel secure.

Good par­ent­ing is hard work. You have to turn off the TV and get up off the couch once in awhile. You need to help them with their school­work, make sure they’re bathed, fed, and not let them run loose in a pack in the neigh­bor­hood. Know who their friends are, set rules and enforce them.

One of our sec­re­taries believes a key to rais­ing good kids is to raise them ‘in church’ so they have a sense of respect for elders and other peo­ple; so the good­ness instilled in them early in their life stays with them (to a large degree) all their lives. That’s some­thing they sure aren’t going to get out there in the world today, left to their own devices as so many are. It’s not up to preschool or day­care or pub­lic school to raise our kids. Chil­dren aren’t pets you can let run loose or give away when they get to be too much trou­ble. Like it or not, chil­dren are for life. They don’t ask to be born any more than we did.

I heard a speaker say once when his chil­dren were try­ing to make a seri­ous deci­sion and asked him for advice, he would tell them, “Think about the worst pos­si­ble out­come of what you’re think­ing of doing. If you can live with that out­come, then it’s prob­a­bly a safe choice.” Later, as adults, they told him when they fol­lowed that advice, it never let them down.

Just think of how dif­fer­ent a place the world would be if we all used that line of reasoning.

Posted by Randa Wagner on Jul 10 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.