In Waitrose last week two children aged about 8 and 6 were riding their bicycles round and round the store. The boy nearly knocked me and an elderly lady over and I said "you really shouldn't ride your bike in the supermarket" and the next thing I knew his mother confronted me (in the dairy aisle) because I'd had the temerity to tell her little angel that he shouldn't do exactly as he pleases all the time.

This kind of thing is all too common these days.

What amazes me is the self-centered immunity to dirty looks. I know that when my nieces and nephews, and my brother and I, misbehaved as children, dirty looks were cast, and my folks' reaction was to be apologetic and to acknowledge the behavior was beyond the pale. Now people can stare daggers at the lackadaisical parent and get, at the most, a bemused shrug or eye roll back, or just a total indifferent stonewall.

Last Sunday I went to an Indian buffet in my neighborhood. I had just returned to my seat with a plate of food when a couple with an adorable little girl walked in. They were probably what you'd call hipsters; this is New York, after all.

When I go to Indian buffets, I first go up and take a small plate for my chutneys and salads and a samosa or whatever other fritters they might have out. Oh, and lemon or lime wedges, they're useful. After putting that on my table, I go back up and get a big plate, survey the main dishes, and then make an X on my plate with rice (or a Y if I only want 3 dishes) so the curries won't run together.

I had just returned to my seat when this young family came in, and on their way to the table behind me, the girl stopped and stared at my plate of food, and asked "Mommy why did he do that with his food?" Mom was pretty embarrassed, so I turned to the kid and explained that I make rice walls to keep my curries from overflowing, and the mom kinda looked at me with rolling eyes and apologized for her daughter's curiosity. I of course said, "No, she's really delightful, it wasn't an imposition at all."

I returned to my book and they went and got their food and I could hear the kid start to fuss, and I got the sense it was because the mom wouldn't make her plate up with dams of rice like mine. While they ate, both parents sounded calm and level-headed, though most of their attention was on their smartphones, checking a schedule, meeting people somewhere, something like that.

Then the girl started to fuss and suddenly both parents spoke really firmly to her, said, "No!" at the same time, and mom said, remarkably calmly, "Okay, we're having a time out. You do not throw food at mommy in a restaurant. You don't throw food at mommy anywhere, or at anyone, anywhere." And she took the kid by the arm and left the restaurant. The little girl whined and cried a little on her way out. Dad sighed.

After a few minutes, I'm not sure how long, they came back in. The girl was calm, went up to her dad and said, "Daddy, I'm sorry," and they sat down and ate and had a conversation about different colors, I guess they had a book open but I'm not sure, it might have been art on the wall or something else.

They left before I did, and the whole family seemed carefree. I thought, that was a good bit of parenting, and that was a good kid, too. I notice bad kids and bad parents all the time, but it's worth it to remember the good ones, too. Sometimes you never get to see the good until it's put to the test.

Also, the aloo gobi was magically delicious.

At least we don't have to worry about helicopter parents anymore? Sounds like the pendulum has swung back.

I will certainly (sometimes) preemptively bribe the kid if I want her to behave somewhere. I'm unapologetic about that if the end result is that lots of other ppl don't have to listen to her complain.

But she would never ever get rewarded after throwing a tantrum.

Luckily, I usually don't have to worry about either. She's reasonably well behaved most of the time and the rest of the time is attention seeking and if you give her calm attention immediately, the situation doesn't devolve.

Thanks for listening, y'all. I typed that at an airport, and finally posted it. Good to get it off my chest. [smiley]

3 year old with a navy corduroy blazer with leather elbow patches = lulz.

The last time I saw my NJ cousins(a few years ago), I mentioned the Kindle. The 13yo asked what it was and I said it was like an Ipod for books. She immediately started crawling in her mother's lap and whined "I want a Kindle. Gimme a Kindle". I seriously wanted to tell her she sounded like Veruca Salt, but held my tongue.

I am not and will never be a parent, but am firmly in the actions have consequences camp.

I grew up in the shadow of an uncle who was both indulged and abused...and don't have any memory of being bribed.

We were too scared of our parents to misbehave.

When my nieces lived with us* they tried a couple times to throw tantrums. I guess I inherited the "mom eye" (sharp look w/raised eyebrow) because that nipped most misbehaving in the bud. It astonished everyone, including myself, how well I parented the kids (their own mother is/was useless as tits on a boar hog and my brother worked long hours, so Mum and I inherited most of the parenting duties even though we worked full time and SIL** sat on her ass all day).

Most Canadians I have seen seem to have a good handle on parenting. It's usually when I visit the US that I see kids (and parents) behaving badly.

*Mum, bro, sis-in-law and me.
**Oh, the stories I could tell!

because I'd had the temerity to tell her little angel that he shouldn't do exactly as he pleases all the time.

This is why I just kick children.

And she took the kid by the arm and left the restaurant. The little girl whined and cried a little on her way out. Dad sighed.

This is similar to the policy in our family: if a child egregiously misbehaved in a restaurant, Dad yoinked that kid out of his/her seat and went [home/to wait in the car] while Mom and the other four kids peacefully, leisurely finished their dinner. They had to do it to each kid once, and only once, before we learned.

and then make an X on my plate with rice (or a Y if I only want 3 dishes) so the curries won't run together.

You. Are. A. Genius. I am adopting this habit at the soonest opportunity.

This is why hipsters shouldn't be allowed to breed.

My kids are generally well-behaved when we are out, perhaps because they know I won't hesitate to give them a smack on the backside if they get too far out of line (which is pretty rare), just because we're in public. At home, though, they are little monsters sometimes. I assume that, because they behave in public, they know how to and are just acting up at home because they can and that they'll eventually grow out of it.

I've also considered (way too late) that I shouldn't be allowed to breed.

Curry is good when it mixes together! I just had a chicken biryani with some lamb madras on top.

This sort of shit is why I hate going anywhere. Plus when kids aren't paying attention and then run into me and get pissed at me. Where the fuck are your parents, you little shit?

Yes, I'm aware that I was a little shit once too, but I was typically too scared of everything to run into people and would tend to just find somewhere to go hide.

When I was a little kid I for whatever reason observed, from a vanishingly small sample, that people from Pennsylvania, through inattention or intent, allowed the different foods on their plates to mix together. Even now, fully understanding my flawed methodology, I chuckle to myself when I think of food-mixing as "eating like a Pennsylvanian."

I don't consider biryanis to be curries, they're what I usually call rice dishes, though I would be fully prepared to be proven wrong if I were to look it up. Perhaps they're categorized as dry curries. I mostly mean gravies, I prefer to keep 'em separated. I would definitely make biryani dams, if the buffet offered it.

Hipsters are the new yuppies, in that otherwise decent people feel like it's okay to joke (or maybe be serious) about murdering them, or hurting their kids, or getting all eugenic on them. The trouble is, it's such a loose class, people who like such-and-such music or art or scene or clothes or bicycle or coffeeshop, it can become a code word for people who have the temerity to live their lives differently than I live mine.

Perfectly good people don't bat an eye when they talk about the nebulous hipster the same way radio talk jockeys talk about the bony-fingered liberal. We eat our own.

My sister was recently at Target and her 3yo decided to throw a tantrum. He is a very strong willed kid and if you give him an inch, etc etc... So she made sure he was ok but basically ignored/did not coddle him.

A stranger came up to her and started cooing at him and telling her she could take care of her kids (of course once the stranger started making cutesy noises and cooing at him, he turned on the big crocodile tears even more). When my sister asked her to please stop, he was just having a tantrum and was fine, she told her she shouldn't be so harsh on him.

I don't know if my sister counts as a hipster. (I'm sure I do, so whatever.) She's a fashion design major so she likes clothes and listens to "hipster" music. But she's also poor and lives with my parents right now and shops at Target/Walmart because that's all she and her husband and two kids can afford.

Heh.

It drives me crazy when other people don't get the basic psychology of what you're doing with your kid.

My kid is still very disinclined to share. I figure, hey, she's not 3 yet, she's still working it all out, and they do it at different paces, so some of her friends are a lot better than sharing than she is, and that's OK. We model sharing and praise her a lot when she does. But we do not, absolutely do not, allow (not the right word, but you know) tantrums when she doesn't want to share.

So we get into this bind with other parents. Her friend Madison (of course we have a friend called Madison) is a great sharer. So the interactions go something like "I want Madison's toy/lollipop/whatever". We tell her she can't have it, or she has to wait her turn and why doesn't she do this, have this, go over here. Cue beginning of freak out. AND THEN the other parent tries to get Madison to share. And is horrified when I won't allow it. I'm like "do not teach Maddie that she can get what she wants by screaming!"

Of course, they are focused on their own kid, not mine, and are trying to model nice sharing behavior, so there you go. Parenting is hard.

The helicopter parents' kids are in college now, so they're forever underfoot during orientation and registration, even to the point of helping them register online for their classes. Madness. I swear, if some kid brings her mother to the interview I'm giving her a Starbucks card and sending her across the street

Anyhoo, here in flyover country it's still expected that kids will behave with Mother, and I'm considered a little strange for not giving the school permission to spank. What gets my goat is when my husband is complimented when they're out with him. "oh, they're *so* well behaved!"

As for the food court thing, that three year old would have been in the sling in a heartbeat.

I got drive-by parented yesterday. My kid was practicing climbing up steps and trotting down a ramp, so I shot a quick video of him with my phone. He asked to see the video, so I took my phone back out and was navigating to the video, when --
some guy walking by snarls to my kid, "Get a phone! Maybe then she'll pay attention to you."

LOL, xo. Who has that kind of time?

I saw something that was the opposite situation. The kind of affluent parents who would eat in a gourmet pizza restaurant (by Tom Douglas), slapping the table with an open hand hard enough to shake it when the little boy wouldn't hold his fork perfectly, not letting the somewhat older girl take her coloring pages with her after the meal because "we're just going to throw them away anyway", and yanking the little boy off the bistro-height table by one arm. The servers thought the kids were just charming, and after the parents left when we told the server about their behavior, she was pretty shocked.

I chuckle to myself when I think of food-mixing as "eating like a Pennsylvanian."

I think of it as Huckleberry Finnian:

"The widow rung a bell for supper, and you had to come to time. When you got to the table you couldn't go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn't really anything the matter with them, -- that is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better."

I had the exact same reaction as Elsa, though - you are a genuis for figuring out the X thing; it's a perfect solution. It's not that I don't like sauces to mix, I think that's fine, but at least at first I want to be able to appreciate the unique flavorings of each one.

My kids never threw fits but they can be hellions. They are mostly well-behaved, and shy and quiet in public, but sometimes they can be unruly. A few weeks ago my sister and I were out shopping with them. They were running through the racks and I just about killed them -- with words, not violence. They walk all over me sometimes and then I start yelling and freaking out and then I feel guilty and then the cycle repeats.

I can be a pushover. It's a real problem and completely my fault. Sometimes I will say no instinctively without thinking about it. They ask again (beg). I question why I said no in the first place and then relent. They have me pegged. This leads to them not respecting me and begging. I am working on this.

My husband never has problems because he is never wishy-washy like I can be.

Once my big kid was asking me for Coke or candy in the check out line and I repeatedly said no and told him not to ask me again. He did, so I stepped on his foot, kept my foot there, and whispered some stern words in his ear. Another shopper witnessed this scene and I didn't give a damn.

This thread reminds me of that couple on Real Housewives of New York, Alex and Simon. They are Cobble Hill yuppies and they allow their two sons, Johan and François, to run riot, and think it's more important to ensure the kids can speak French than to know how to behave in a restaurant or in the company of other adults or children.

In one memorable episode, through someone pulling strings for them, they managed to wangle an interview for François at some really fancy private school in Manhattan, but the way the kid behaved, you'd have thought he was autistic, he displayed absolutely no social skills, his attention span was about 4 seconds and he was obviously not the precocious genius his parents believed him to be. They were astonished when he wasn't accepted in that, or indeed any other, private school and he ended up having to go to a local PS Elementary school where the poor kid probably gets the shit kicked out of him.

Kids on bikes in a store? That's when I yell in my loudest voice, "Hey, manager, you got kids riding bikes inside the store." I doubt their insurance would have much good to say in the event of a lawsuit.

Perfectly good people don't bat an eye when they talk about the nebulous hipster the same way radio talk jockeys talk about the bony-fingered liberal. We eat our own.

I have to agree that it's not a hipster issue but a general parenting issue; the hipster ID is a red herring. And it's nice to have a safe, harmless place to vent about scenes like this, which maybe allow the witness to refrain from saying something snotty on the scene.

I have some loved ones who --- I will admit here --- I think are abominably inept parents: not abusive, but frantic and angry and constantly offering negative reinforcement. They complain constantly about their kids' behavior, even when it's occasionally good. They expect the very worst, and unsurprisingly the kids deliver the worst. These parents (appear to me to have) created a narrative in which the children provide them with constant material for frustration and disappointment, and the children live up to that with enthusiasm.

It makes me so sad, because the kids are so smart and sweet and funny... and so very loving! When I've been alone with them, they're lovely and they behave well, and their parents have more than once marveled at how well they behaved when I was playing with them. (I know, I know --- it's easy for a not-parent to say, because they're different with me than they are with their parents for a whole host of reasons, and it's easier for me to be patient because I get to hand them back afterward.) They want to be good --- but their parents don't tell them what "good" looks like, just what "bad" looks like.

And I don't know what to do or say about that, if anything. It's not abuse, it's not neglect, it's just a crappy dynamic that shows no signs of changing. But I'm seeing it from a distance (and a great distance at that), so I know I'm only seeing part of it. Should I keep my damn mouth shut and just keep up a a loving relationship with these kids? I can't imagine what I could say to the parents that would be received well, or even acknowledged.

I've seen it too, Elsa. It gives me a lot to think about because while for the most part I think I have an easygoing household and easygoing parenting style, sometimes I can be on edge and have very little patience. Insecure parents like me have a lot of fear. Fear that we're not doing the right thing or handling situations in the best way. I think the best thing you can do is politely disagree with the parents and remind them how great their kids are. A lot of parents are overwhelmed and filled with anxiety. They want and expect so much from their offspring and fail to see that the kids are okay just the way they are. I have a cousin who whenever I ask about her kids she'll reply with, "they're brats". Every time. Kidding or not, it's not productive or respectful. I would love it if she told me what and how they are really doing.