Lessons in Poor Parenting March 30, 2008
I’ve discovered that if you want to see sub par parting in action, all you need to do is visit my local Walmart past 8pm. I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while now, but I kept forgetting. So here I go…
Walmart once was the goto place for all my nonfood shopping needed. I’m not a wealthy person. And I’m not about to go to the mall to buy clothes and shoes and such. So Walmart was the place for me. I said WAS. A few years ago a Meijer and a Target were put in not far from our local Walmart. In case you don’t know, Meijer is one of those super stores with groceries, food, toys, home stuff, all wrapped into one. And well, Target is like an upscale Walmart. With the coming of Meijer and Target, Walmart got bumped down to third class. I hate to say it, but now our Walmart seems to attract mostly lower income/lower class people. Oh, and me. But honestly, I usually avoid that store because it can be kind of scary over there, especially at night.
Which brings me to my point. This past week I went over to Walmart to check out their winter clearance racks. I was hoping to stock up on clothes for Amy and Scott for next fall/winter. I will say that Walmart pulled through for me in my quest. But if you want to see some poor parenting in action, just stroll through my local Walmart past 8pm. For starters, anyone who has their kids out at stores past 8 are just asking for trouble. I may not be a perfect parent, but I really feel that young kids don’t need to be out and about on a regular basis past 8pm. Even if your kids don’t go to bed until 8:30 or 9, I think they should still probably be home finishing homework or reading bedtime stories or in general getting ready for bed. So OK, some people keep their kids out a little late on school nights. That’s not the worst thing in the world. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen tired crying babies and toddlers in stores like Walmart and Target past 8 at night. Then what are the parents of these kids usually doing to help their crying children? In my experience they are usually yelling at their kids to “Shut up or I’m gonna smack you!” I’ve seen lots and lots of parents yelling and making threats to their kids in my Walmart. It’s quite sad to watch. Sometimes I wonder if I ought to say something. But what good would that do? Well that pretty much sums it up. It’s not like I’ve seen kids being beaten at Walmart. Though I have seen kids smacked on the hand. I’ve just seen a lot of parents out late with no regard for the children’s need to be asleep and they react to their crying kids by yelling and hitting. Certainly there are much worse things that parents could do and have done to their children. Maybe these Walmart shopping parents are super terrible and abusive in the privacy of their own homes. Maybe not. But it makes me sick to think about it. I can mentally/emotionally handle thinking about a lot of the junk that goes on in the world today. But when it comes to bad things happening to children, I just can’t handle that. It makes me feel awful. That’s why I can’t watch the evening news. I know terrible things are happening to children all over the world. But I don’t want to have to hear about it first hand. It effects me personally and deeply. And sometimes I want to rush out and adopt every sad little kid in the world! I can’t save everyone. (And lets face it, if I had millions and millions of kids, I’d be a pretty awful parent too!) So I feel like there’s nothing I can really do to help those kids in bad situations. What would you do if you saw someone mistreating their child in public?
If you think you see bad parenting at Wal-Mart, try coming to the ER some time. The other day I came home and thanked Kerry for being a good Mom. I think she probably could have been beating Jenna with a baseball bat and she still would have seemed like a good Mom.
Yeah, I bet you see some pretty scary stuff in the ER, all around.
Certainly I’m not saying that Walmart is the end all place for bad parenting. It’s just where I happen to see the worst of it, in the little LDS bubble I live in.
Saying something just gets you in trouble. These crabby parents would love an excuse to smack someone…er, you. But it’s sad for the kids. I don’t like to see it and i want them to stop, but a stranger saying something is not going to affect it. Then it escalates and they go to braden’s ER.
n,;bv /……………………..bbbbbb n cz e ooooooooyqgv cd ojb2rt c vi-/i87u8// The above was written by Ian (5 months) with gleeful flourish. I will translate:
“Be nice to me… bbbbbb! I am precious! So precious!
Yep, I’ve seen it too, at Wal-Mart and grocery stores in particular, almost always after the kids should be in bed and even as late as 11 p.m.! It makes me so sad, and I’ve come close to saying something a few times. I want to, but hesitate because I really doubt anything I could say in passing would really help those poor children, or their parents. I suspect the parents are probably a product of poor parenting themselves and have no clue how to break the cycle, or even that it needs to be broken. It’s hard to think about how many people, especially kids, don’t have the basics of love, care, food, and sleep.
What if they are single parents who work all day and don’t have loving husbands/fathers to watch the kids while they go shopping, or, better yet, husbands that go shopping for them and so they bring their kids to wal-mart because they have no choice? Just a thought. Of course, I have seen the whole family at wal mart after 8, with mom and dad tag-team yelling at the kids. that one is always fun.
well i guarantee that many of these lower income families are not married. they probably don’t have loving husbands/wives to help out with the kids. so maybe that is part of the reason they are out with their kids late at night. and i bet too that if i was a single parent that i’d have much less patience with my kids. but i bet a lot of it has to do, too, with culture and a cycle of poor parenting and broken homes.