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Originally Posted by raeanna74
1. Use inside voices.
2. No climbing on chairs, benches, or even tables.
3. No running.
4. No throwing toys or crayons.
5. No coloring on the tables.
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To me, this list is a big fat "duh." But it also makes me think that this isn't a "duh" for the people quoted in this article.
You know, it wasn't that long ago that I was a kid meself, and between my brother and I we have excellent memories of what it was like to be children. My parents, being educators, took us along to conventions and the like, which didn't always include kid-friendly activities, and a Hilton doesn't always come with a family-friendly restaurant. Since my mother usually insisted on staying in a four-star hotel whenever we traveled (this is before the days of Holiday Inn Express), it meant that we kids had to get used to eating in fairly nice restaurants at a fairly early age. When I saw this article, I was immediately amazed that 1) parents would allow their children to behave this way in public, PERIOD, 2) that they expected to be able to get away with it, and 3) that these children have not been taught that this is not how one acts in a public situation.
Certainly, they are children, but children are far more capable of understanding than we give them credit for. This "kids will be kids" business is bullshit. Kids will be kids, but they have the ability to understand that sometimes the "kid" has to be left home and they have to be on their best behavior. I'm not suggesting all children need to turn into little adults, but I know that as a child I understood that there was a time and a place to be a kid, and a time and a place to be polite, practice good etiquette, etc. I knew that every place I went in public, I had to take "Molly Manners" with me (This was an actual concept my mother came up with. She put us through basic etiquette lessons my entire childhood, using "Molly Manners" as the perfect example of how to behave. I know it worked and I will use it with my children.) and if I didn't, there would be consequences (though most people understood when my brother nearly fell asleep in his spaghetti at a nice Italian place in the Anaheim Hilton after a long plane ride from Seattle...the strolling violinist managed to catch my brother's head in time, thank God).
It seems to me as if we (they) are in turn raising a generation with a sense of entitlement. These parents are being childish in their demands to be able to take their children everywhere; it seems to me that don't understand the idea that parenthood means sacrifice. In turn, they're raising their kids to believe that they deserve to get whatever they want. That isn't how the world works, despite what they may believe. These children are going to be sorely disappointed as adults. Besides, all these parents are doing are raising kids that will need to be mollycoddled the rest of their lives.