Comment on Not stealing
Windex007@lemmy.world 6 hours agoYes, there is a point I’m trying to make, which is it’s intrinsic to the human condition to paint a much rosier version of your own childrearing experiences once they’re historical.
The internet is awash with new parents wildly frustrated with how incredibly out-of-touch the platitudes they hear about their experience even coming from other older parents.
Your original comment is just that. Judgemental and out of touch. You can make a kid act like that? A screaming toddler? There will certainly be times when nothing you can do within the laws of physics can PREVENT them from acting like that. My toddler threw a hysterical fit because the garage door can’t be SIMULTANEOUSLY open AND closed. No, son, I know you believe Daddy can do anything but quantum super positions are even out of my hands.
Should the guy have called his kid an asshole? No.
How harshly should you judge them for it? In that moment? Probably not very.
rumba@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
Nice, see that that’s much better than a one-word snark. We can open a dialog.
I’d say that after raising two, and the youngest only being a handful of years since todler-dom, (and my eldest having spectrum issues), I still feel the pain and confusion, and we even had to seek professional help for the eldest. I’ve actually had training of how to deal with the situations for a child that had real emotional problems.
Yet there you are judging me, betting I don’t have kids, then moving the posts to I don’t have young kids right now.
Let’s disassemble my post:
It’s literally one person’s memory about a guy carrying a toddler throwing a full-on fit through a parking lot. Zero context. But you don’t generally carry them distance while they’re throwing the fit, you remove them from the situation, get them someplace quiet and work with them. 9:10 times they’re just tired and you can calm them and not carry them while they’re screaming enough that you’re scared someone is going to call the authorities.
I didn’t lay blame at the guys feet, I said he might have been stretched thin. That’s not really out of touch by my standards.
If you’re calling your toddler an asshole in public to other strangers, whom you’re worried about the impression they have, that’s clearly not healthy. You can call that judgmental if you’d like, but I can also give you the number of a doctor who will tell you the same.
Now, let’s disassemble your post:
That’s a great goalpost move. You can disagree with me all you want, but this take is just bad out of context.
Yes, new parents are wildly frustrated that someone tells them what they’re doing is wrong because it seems like a personal attack. It’s not. They survived and are offering how they did it, maybe the advice applies, maybe it doesn’t, everyone situation is different.
If you’re going to call every parent who doesn’t have a 2-3 year-old out of touch, that’s another hot take. If everyone around you is out of touch, it may not be them that is the problem.
Screeming all the way across a parking lot? To the point where you have to excuse yourself to others by calling the kid an asshole? within the laws of physics? My toddler threw a hysterical fit because the garage door can’t be SIMULTANEOUSLY open AND closed.
The prime difference here is that you didn’t have to persuade strangers that you were’t stealing the child and call the child an asshole because they were upset about a nonsensical thing. You also didn’t ignore them and carry them through a public place. The scene wasn’t so large than one random person felt the need to do a write up on social media. That’s pretty much the hallmark that the person isn’t handling the situation nominally.
I was defending the guy when someone else said the apple didn’t fall from the tree.
Windex007@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
I don’t have the current capacity to give this the response it deserves, so I’m going to hit a few key points of where I believe misunderstanding exists and then let you reevaluate what points still need pressing.
I don’t think I’ve ever moved the goalposts. My initial comment is what it always was, that you don’t CURRENTLY have a toddler. I think this is directly relevant to my thesis that parenting evaluations from people who aren’t themselves currently experiencing it need to be weighed as such (certainly not authoritative, and divorced from the reality of the experience)
Nextly, I think it’s worth deconstructing two things:
did the observer genuinely think it was a kidnapping ?
why did the father feel the need to justify?
I’m going to say “probably not” to the first, and to the second probably because of the keen awareness that parents have about how much people love the armchair deconstruction of their parenting. Thankfully, I got some great advice very early on from another parent which was, in short, to get comfortable ignoring the musings of others on the subject of parenting.
But I do think, after reading your post, it would probably make me more inclined to feel the need to justify myself if I were I in the same situation. How do I convince this bystander I’m X, Y, or Z? This person is trying to gather the variables to ultimately determine what I’m doing wrong as a parent.
I also don’t think it’s realistic that you can’t move a tantruming toddler through a public space… Especially if the immediate destination is the car. This hits me as very dogmatic.
The car, for example, IS my kids happy place. It IS the best place to calm him down. Get in the car and sing John Denver together. It seems, to me, cruel to deprive him of that even if I know he’s going to be pissed off on the way there.
I can respond more fully when I’m off mobile… And maybe I’ve over-attributed judgement on your part. I think you’ve read much more into the original post than is there, and have mentally constructed a scenario much more disturbing than it was. I think the dad calling the kid an asshole was what made it post-worthy, not some level of violence.
rumba@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
I’m perfectly willing to scope down, I’m def not trying to say anything in between the lines.
Not likely, most parents have more fear about other people’s thoughts than other people actually have during said thoughts. Unfortunately, you’d be hard-pressed for a stranger to act even if they thought the kid was being stolen. As initially said, we’re scant on fact, he might have had somewhere to be and had to run with the kid. we’ll never know. I don’t love his asshole comment, it doesn’t bode well for him, but I can’t tell him how to live either. We don’t even really have an age on the kid :/
As others have said, maybe it was a bad joke. The observer seemed to be paying what he perceived as undue attention to them.
In public, I don’t generally feel the need to apologize for toddlers’ behavior unless people are more or less trapped with them (plane, restaurant, maybe a checkout line). If we’re in a department store, they can generally just get out of earshot of us for a hot minute until the kid calms down. Most tantrums are shorter than they feel.
In a restaurant, I’ve historically spent about a minute with misdrecition or bartering serotonin before I just removed them to an outside space to let them calm down. If you have the time, it’s best to take them somewhere without a lot of stimulation and basically ignore the behavior until they get over it. It’s kind of like a minute per year timeout just to let them calm, not as a structured punishment.
It’s not so much a worry about subjecting the public to it as it is about not reinforcing the behavior and helping them learn to soothe. They can be upset, cry, but we’re not moving while we’re having a commotion if at all possible. Over the years, they learn to take a deep breath when they’re upset and not act in frantic rage. Well if you’re lucky, anyway.
We fostered for a number of years before our kids, so I’ve had to deal with a few toddlers who haven’t always been from the best home environments. My wife had been fostering for a decade before we met. However bad you’ve got it, someone out there probably has it worse. Oh god do I have stories.