The worst plane flight of my life was a transatlantic hop in which a baby cried pretty much uninterrupted from takeoff to landing. To make it worse, the child was really too old to be a baby anymore. He was a chunky twenty-month-0ld! His parents appeared to have no strategy able to calm him! Things got so bad, a nun offered advice at great length to the obviously hapless parents.
Yes, that was a long flight. Numerous passengers would have happily pushed the eject button on that child, even if it had landed him in the Arctic Ocean.
Did I mention the “baby” in question was my own beloved Tiger?
And short of a direct appeal to the Ceiling Cat, we tried everything to calm him. He was just pissed. To keep his ears from clogging, we’d given him a sippy cup during takeoff (one piece of advice that the well-meaning but ostentatiously helpful nun shared with us, after the fact). We’d packed a few toys. We tried walking the aisles with him. We tried rocking and singing him to sleep. Nothing worked.
At twenty months, the Tiger had no stable words. None. Not even “no”! We had no way of knowing why he was so upset. We couldn’t reason with him. Short of wrapping a gag around his mouth, we couldn’t “control” him. We were seasoned travelers with kids by then. My husband had just completed a grueling round of chemotherapy in Germany, and we weren’t traveling on a whim. We were just trying to get home after an eight-month unplanned stay in Germany that began as a brief vacation and reached its zenith months later in the ICU. We were lucky my mate survived. And now we were doing our darndest to comfort the Tiger and let everyone sleep.
So when discussions of “childfree spaces” on a feminist blog (Feministe) quickly jump to saying that sharing a plane with kids is tantamount to a “hostage situation, I’d like to know exactly who’s the hostage here? I’m fairly sure only two people suffered worse than I on that flat: the Tiger and his dad. Well, maybe the nun, too.
We’re in the midst of another shitstorm in the feminist blogosphere, this time about parents’ rights to take their kids anywhere, anytime. The post that touched if off (by guestblogger Mai’a at Feministe) framed it in absolutist terms: We parents should be able to take our kids to bars where the patrons are inebriated and watch the sun come up. Obviously, this is risible. What kid will benefit from spending the whole night out with a parent, sidestepping being trod upon by drunks? Karmithia at Alas sagely pointed out the obvious: late nights at bars are good for neither parent nor child.
It’s unfortunate that Mai’a chose such an extreme example, because I can’t recall seeing a child at a bar – ever – as opposed to a relatively family-friendly bar-restaurant. Had she chosen a less silly example, her post would have still attracted the virulently childfree, but her main argument – that excluding children also marginalizes their mothers – would have been much more defensible. The central question she raised – are children an oppressed class? – also deserved more nuanced discussion. What happened instead was the far more predictable volley of accusations against “entitled” parents. (Much of the incivility came from people who’ve raised kids themselves, so this wasn’t merely a debate between mothers and non-mothers).
Most of the gripes raised in that comment thread addressed strawmen (or strawkids?): the presence of kids in adult-only bars, the ubiquity (?) of kids in upscale restaurants, and the notion that most (maybe all) parents just let their kids run wild 24/7. I have sometimes seen the last problem in family-friendly restaurants, and I’m not here to defend the fairly small minority of parents who seem unconcerned about their child tripping up a server laden with drinks and burning-hot food. I’ve rarely seen kids in pricier places, but I’ll be honest: I prefer to stick to family-friendly restaurants for everyone’s peace of mind. (Or, rarely, go out for a nice meal while a sitter watches our kids.) And bars? Seriously, I don’t get around much anymore, but I have yet to see swarms of kids at cocktail bars or at any grow-mutt party.
There’s just one area where I’ve seen systematic parenting fail: dragging wee ones to PG-13 and R-rated movies. I first noticed this a decade ago, pre-parenthood, when my husband and I took in a matinee of the first X-Files movie. The theater was full of tots who really, really didn’t belong there. Sure, they were loud, and that was annoying, but the real failure impacted the kids. Maybe they weren’t overtly disturbed. I don’t care! I have deep qualms about desensitizing small children to violence, which is what happens when they’re fed a steady diet of violence as preteens and even preschoolers. Yeah, a babysitter costs money. So do cinema tickets. Prevail upon your friends and relatives if you must keep up with Scully and Mulder.
But even the bad judgment of a few parents at the movies is red herring. Judging from the Feministe discussion and perennial nasty Internet comments about kids, the real issue is not R-rated movies, upscale restaurants, grown-up bars, or parties where you can gleefully drop the F-bomb.
Here’s the real problem: Some folks aren’t willing to accept kids in public, period. People really hate sharing airplanes with kids. Too many resent kids in downscale restaurants. Feministe commenters complained about kids on the subway – and oh boy, you need to keep your kids close on the subway as a safety measure, but I have never seen kids run wild on any form of public transit in Berlin. Sometimes, like my Tiger, they like to twist around and kneel on the seats to peer out windows, but they are not posing a public danger. Yet, even when they perch on their seats like little Victorian dolls, they’ve still gotten the evil eye. I thought this was just a Berlin issue, but perhaps U.S. coastal cities are even worse? Feministe commenters pissed and moaned about kids making noise in Target and supermarkets. I mean, really – supermarkets? Who has the cash to hire a babysitter while we buy the food we need to survive??! And does this mean Target’s now off bounds for me, but Wal-Mart is okay?
Basically, anytime people feel they can’t quickly escape, a few of them insist that children better not make a peep. At the same time, these same folks systematically ignore the drunken passengers lurching through the subway car, or the couple on the transatlantic flight who carry on loud conversations in the aisles from Halifax to Ireland. (Actually, I suspect some of them are the drunken and chatty passengers.)
I understand their irritation. I remember feeling similarly at times before I had kids, but if I could see their parents hadn’t fully checked out, I got over myself. I recall only one time when the parents were obviously slacking: yet another transatlantic stretch with a Gameboy turned up to 11 and no headphones in sight. (The parents read and slept while the Gameboy beeped cheerfully all across the ocean.) Nowadays, when a child starts to wail in the plane or grocery store, I feel a nanosecond of irritation, followed by a massive wave of relief: Hey, that’s not my child anymore! And then I feel empathy with the parent and child. If we pass each other, I’ll flash a smile, unless the situation seems too far gone.
I do agree that there are a few places where kids categorically don’t belong: nightclubs, sex clubs, extremely upscale restaurants, and yes, bars while the sun is rising. Heck, parents need a few kid-free spaces, too, for those times when we get to escape! Kids shouldn’t stay any longer in a university library than their desperate parent needs to pick up a few books and leave again. (My little town has a great city library that’s welcoming to them.) Concerts, theater, and hospitals may be perfectly appropriate places, depending on the kids and the circumstances. (I will note that once my mate escaped the ICU but was still in the hospital, the Tiger behaved like a little angel, confined to his stroller and fed continuously with Butterkeks, the German equivalent of graham crackers.)
Parents are responsible for discerning how well their sprouts are able to behave. And yes, I do think kids need to learn to be civil, unlike a few Feministe commenters at the other extreme, who decried that as authoritarian. Civilization happens by gradually stretching the limits of what kids can gracefully handle, and by giving them clear boundaries that gradually expand.
But geez, we shouldn’t have to lock ourselves inside Chuck. E. Cheese until all our children have left for college. I’ve read extremists who say parents should just avoid all air travel until their kids are young adults. Parents remain people, too (often with family four times zones away). And kids are people. I really like how Sierra put this at Strollerderby:
I’m a mom who believes that the well-being of our children is a shared responsibility of everyone. My kids are not an exotic hobby, or a bizarre lifestyle choice. They are little people with all the rights and privileges people are entitled to. Their emotional and physical well-being is in your interest as well as mine.
One of the most important points to be made here about kids being people is that their parents, particularly their mothers, are not their puppetmasters. If my kid starts wailing and throwing boxes of cereal in Aisle 7, I can’t just apologize and turn the volume off the way I can if my cell phone goes off in a crowded theater.
I can do my best to help her behave well; keep her well-rested and fed and entertained. But if she’s losing it, she’s just like any other person with a problem. What she needs is help. You’d never go up to a 25-year-old sobbing two tables away from you at a restaurant and tell them to be quiet; you’d either stay out of it or offer help. Kids deserve to be treated the same way.
Similarly, if a kid crosses a line with you, the thing to do is to gently hold the kid accountable. Politely ask her to quiet down, return your toy or get off your foot.
Generating a culture of fear around moms in public, that they’d better get those kids to shut up and act sweet or else, only serves to make us more fearful as parents. Frightened moms are stricter, less flexible and ultimately less able to handle stressful situations that crop up with their kids. Ease up a little, and the kids will have fewer meltdowns to begin with. Everyone wins.
Also: They will pay for our Social Security someday. Now might be a propitious time to start treating them kindly. If we do that, they might actually grow up to be nicer than the commentariat at Feministe (or heaven forbid, the even nastier trainwreck on Jezebel).
In my own life, I’ve been nothing but lucky to have friends and family who’ve embraced my kids, even whey they’re stinkers, and even when said friends have chosen not to spawn. I honor their choices, and they honor mine. My boys are surrounded by love. It’s really just a few strangers who’ve made it hard at times. Hmmm … is that what they mean by “stranger danger”?
By now, the Tiger is a pretty good flyer. We had one more horrid flight (Minneapolis to Columbus, just me with the two boys) where he howled for most of it. My husband met us at the airport. He’d already heard that the Tiger had been a terror. One of his colleagues had been sitting in one row ahead of us. I didn’t spot her, though I knew her casually. She sure didn’t identify herself; it was far more fun to report on my child’s misbehavior, with great relish, after the flight. I’m sure my husband was the first to know, but certainly not the last.
I’d like to credit my parenting – or even the global village – for the fact that on every flight since, people have complemented us on our kids. But when I’m out with kids among strangers, that global village scarcely, except to meddle and gossip. As for our parenting – well, it’s been eclipsed by the invention of the portable DVD player.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
Great post!
I’m a fan of kids, though I have none (yet). There are very few places I expect to be child-free. Bars, restaurants where I’m paying at least $50 a plate for my dinner, and R-rated movies or movies after say, 9 pm are pretty much the extent of it. I get that kids will be kids, and generally try not to be obnoxious with the eyerolling and whatnot when I witness a tantrum. I’m sensitive to that kind of thing because of the way people act when my sister dares to be a person acting like a person with Autism in public.
That said, I am sometimes annoyed by people who don’t seem to understand that they can mitigate the behavior of children by coming prepared. Last weekend at a wedding, a mother with a very new infant and two very young boys sat in front of me. She brought NOTHING for the two very young boys to do during what was for them, I’m sure, a very long and boring event. They quickly became unruly, but because her arms were full of newborn, she couldn’t do much about it. I didn’t see any partner with her, and she obviously had her hands full. Soon the boys were punching each other in the face, during the ceremony. I distracted one by pointing out a lizard on the windowsill. He stared at it happily and quietly, just observing it. Another lady handed the other boy a pen to color on a program with. I felt simultaneously so sorry for this woman, but also annoyed. Why did she bring those kids? Why didn’t she bring something for them to do? Why didn’t she leave when it was clear they were going to be a problem? I just felt like the whole situation violated some sort of social contract: I do what I can to accept kids being kids in public if you do your part to minimize the obnoxiousness as much as possible. Obviously on a plane or something, this is not always possible, but it’s totally possible to walk out a wedding ceremony. I witnessed other parents with young kids do exactly that at that very wedding.
I think a good rule of thumb when people want to judge parents taking kids out is the simple question “What would you want the parents to do?”
So, yes, I confess—I’m one of those people who hates screaming babies on planes. But I don’t judge. I don’t think those parents are ridiculous for bring their kids on the plane. What would I want them to do? Leave the kids at home? Ship the kids in a crate? Families travel. Maybe the family is traveling to see dying grandparents. There isn’t really any recourse in that situation. Even if the grandparents aren’t dying, one can hardly expect parents to drive cross-country for every holiday or special gathering, simply to avoid the embarrassment of strangers staring at them.
In the case of the rated-R movie. Well, yes, a little judgment makes sense there. Get a babysitter. Wait until it comes out on DVD and watch it at home. There’s no reason your baby has to be there.
So let me see if I get this. Children have the right to be in public places but only the ones you approve of and frequent with your kids. Anybody who departs from your lifestyle is wrong. It seems like this is the cetral point you are trying to make: “let’s all be exactly like me.”
Um Clarissa, did you and I read the same post? I don’t think Sungold said that at all.
I wasn’t comfortable with all of Mai’a's post. Kids aren’t like purses that you can carry around everywhere. They have wants & needs. Extreme examples of bars aren’t well equipped to handle that. It’s not fair to be a kid getting dragged allover town and exhausted. I had a hard enough time behaving when my mom dragged me around the shopping mall to purchase clothes for herself and me. And kids are people, but they have not yet earned all the same rights as adults (which actually I have some problems with. Some rights you get when you turn 18 or 21 are so arbitrary.) Kids can’t leave. They’re subject to the whims & desires of their caretakers. Hopefully those desires are in the kid’s best interest.
PS Sorry about the Gameboy. No I’m kidding… I always put my DS on mute when I’m on the plane!
I felt so bad for these kids sitting in front of me on a recent flight home… the family in front of me had 2 kids. They seemed so… unprepared. They had to ask to be seated together at the last minute so I’m surprised they hadn’t bought seats sooner then they had, but whatever. But then they also requested the vegetarian meal at the last minute but the airline attendants said you were supposed to do that in advance but whatever…
But then the in-flight movie wasn’t working so the poor kids had nothing to do for 4 hours. It was annoying but even I couldn’t blame them for getting rowdy and bratty after awhile.
I mean come on, *I* have a Gameboy to keep me busy. You couldn’t get some classic games for Junior and Juniorette? The family appeared well enough off so that I don’t think cost would have been an issue.
There’s 1 other thing though about the portable DVD player…
Um I think that, a family restaurant… maybe not the appropriate place to watch Spongebob. It seemed like such a waste. Bring your family to this nice good tasty restaurant but instead of talking or having a coloring book, your kid is glazed over watching a cartoon at the table. My parents would never have let me get away with that.
Right on. I don’t have kids myself, and don’t know if I ever will, but I totally agree with your post.
The discussions in the feminist blogosphere about kids is just… bizarre to me. Both for the reasons you outline, but also because it seems like there is this expectation that parents are supposed to be perfect and always prepared for every situation their kid throws at them. From what I’ve gathered from the parents I know, things just don’t work like that. Parents are human too. Meaning they ain’t perfect. And so are kids.
And frankly, I think it takes an awful lot of gall for these people to call parents entitled, when it’s pretty clear to me that the sense of entitlement is on the other side of the fence…
Gah. It just makes me angry. And I don’t even have kids.
Oh, we get kids in the uni library from time to time. They’re fine. Probably because their parents know that the kids are not expected to be there, and are expected to be quiet in the quiet areas and not run about or destroy things. Sometimes I digitally clean up weird old pictures from scanned medieval books to print for the reference staff to give to them as colouring sheets. One of them likes to sing to herself while colouring, but she’s quieter about it than the guy who refills the soda machine, and has a better voice.
Public librarians are often tell me that parents drop kids off in the children’s area and then sneak away, leaving the kids to be supervised by library staff for five hours solid. Or they simply tell their kids to go there after school because nobody’s home, leaving librarians daily caring for kids whose parents they have never seen. We need public childcare facilities that are free or minimal-cost and actually equipped to fill that role safely.
Wow, Clarissa. Talk about a willful misreading of my post. If all I thought was that everyone should do exactly as I do with my kids, I could’ve said it in 1/10 the words! I wrote: “I do agree that there are a few places where kids categorically don’t belong: nightclubs, sex clubs, extremely upscale restaurants, and yes, bars while the sun is rising.” I also said that trips to a university library with a young child need to be kept short (this, from personal experience – and out of respect for the work people are doing there). Other than that, I think it depends on the situation and the kid. Where’s your objection to that?
To everyone else: I agree that it’s good to be prepared. This is important first and foremost for your kids’ happiness and your own sanity – and yes, I think there’s something of a social contract, as EB says, which obligates parents to think ahead and try to defuse obvious looming problems. Some kids go to church regularly and know how to sit through a long service. Mine don’t. So I wouldn’t want to show up at a wedding without some markers and paper.
Sometimes, though, you can be prepared and still have a problem. Once on a cross-country flight, the DVD player pooped out. It just broke. I was alone with the kids (my partner would join us later) and so I had to explain to the Tiger that we wouldn’t get to watch movies after all. We did have coloring supplies etc., but that wears thin after a couple of hours. I got lucky that time, in that both kids slept.
I do empathize with people who are irritated by the cries of children. We *all* are, by nature – we’re programmed to *respond* to children, not ignore ‘em. This has obvious survival advantages. The thing is, in the modern world we’re also expected not to interfere with other parents’ decisions, and I generally appreciate that. But even more, I appreciate when someone responds with gentleness and kindness, as EB and the other woman did. That’s not interference; it’s part of that elusive community. And I think that’s what Mai’a was getting at when she asked others to support frazzled parents – not asking people to take over the parents’ responsibilities, just pointing out the helpfulness of a smile or a silly face or a peekaboo. Some of the Feministe readers seemed to deliberately misread that part of her post.
K – I did once let the Tiger watch a DVD in a cafe. It was the final of the World Cup in 2006, and we wanted to watch it with a crowd, but knew he’d be bored. So once he’d had enough soccer, he got cartoons (with headphones on) and everyone else got to see Zinadine Zidane’s infamous headbutt.
Grafton – If parents supervise the kids and they’re quiet, that’s fine. My 10-year-old would be fine with that; my 7-year-old would get antsy.
Which points to one aspect that my post should have perhaps emphasized: Kids change. A wild toddler won’t be “controllable” (as some folks think he ought to be) by age four. Not unless the parents punish harshly, and I find it appalling that anyone thinks that’s a good idea. But that same kid may be quite civilized at age 10, capable of sitting through and enjoying a classical music performance. Parents generally have a pretty clear view of this, apart from a small minority who are more concerned about their own desires than their kids’ well-being.
And as for traveling to see dying grandparents: The whole point is to spend time with them before they’re dying! My dad is starting to lose his tether to reality. It’s important for my kids to know him. He lives 2000 miles away from us.
Now I’m off to the zoo for the day – one place where kids are definitely welcome! I trust everyone will keep it civil until I can check back in.
My boyfriend Gary and I are frequently complimented for how well behaved, respectful, and polite the kids are when we are in public. That is an important point, because we make an effort to be sure we are teaching the children to be respectful of those around them when we are out, no matter where we are.
I have been in far too many circumstances where parents don’t take the time to do this, and their children are the reason so many wish for children-free public areas. I am not against kids in public. I am against parents who refuse to, or simply can’t, do their job in teaching children respect and courtesy. Screaming, temper tantrums, throwing things, etc. are great ways to make sure no one wants to be around you, adult or otherwise.
Bear in mind, though, that all this teaching takes time. And it can all go kerflooey on a day when the child is coming down with a virus, didn’t sleep enough, or just got out of bed grumpy. Sometimes, a parent who appears not to be intervening may have deliberately chosen to ignore bad behavior, because negative attention is still attention, after all. Sometimes, that child may have a developmental disability. Or – to come closer to your situation – they may be confused if one parent has higher standards than the other. (I know a couple in that situation, and their daughter was initially very volatile when they split; lately, now that she’s had months to sort things out, she’s been much calmer and happier when I’ve seen her with her dad. But the transition period was ugly. In your case, it sounds like the kids have pretty well figured out what you and Gary expect, which is so important for them in the long run.)
Where I live, the parents in my social circles have pretty similar standards and values to mine and my husband’s – not overly permissive, not authoritarian, just trying to set reasonable and consistent boundaries. We don’t always succeed, but we’re usually on the same page in terms of philosophy. But I also see lots of families that are less economically privileged (I live in Appalachia), and when their kids act up in public, it’s common to hear them threaten to “whup” their offspring. Children can’t be perfectly controlled with threats, either, and those threats and whuppings exact a high cost. I don’t aim to control my kids – I hope to *teach* them, as you say. That takes some time, but in the end, as adults, I hope they’ll have healthy self-control and a healthy skepticism toward authority.
The thing is there are four sorts of people:
1. Parents who don’t parent:
They’re responsible for obnoxious kid misbehaviour that goes on for long times and are usually the first to get angry about their rights and how dare you not like the fact that their little precious angel is howling the place down ignored by them.
2. Sensitive parents who do parent:
Some are often hyper sensitive to criticism because they do care about what people think, we’re not talking about them when we complain about obnoxious kids but they feel attacked anyway because being a parent is a big thing for them.
3. Reasonable individuals with or without children:
People like me, who don’t think much of non-parenting parents, who do complain about the time that un-watched spout put spaghetti in our hair or decided to climb on stage in the middle of swan lake.
We may like or enjoy the presence of children, we’ll tolerate bad moments if we can see the parent is trying to do something about it but is not having any luck, but we also don’t enjoy non-existent parenting and selfish or ignorant decisions made by bad parents which usually impacts others.
Unreasonable individuals with or without children:
Those who get angry if a child even giggles near them, they may actively hate children (even their own if they have them), they expect parents to be perfect all the time. Fortunately this latter group are rare.
Just two things of note, the vast majority of posters did not want children to be banned from public, they wanted for all parents to parent (ie recognise when and where places are inappropriate for kids and to at least try to keep disruption to the minimum if they can) and for people like mai’a to recognise certain truths like not only does her kid being a person not mean that everyone has to like said kid or want to spend time with said kid. I may like an adult, I may not care for their kid, it’s no different to liking someone and not liking their brother. Not liking someone’s kid as an individual or not wanting to spend time around said kid constantly is not a rejection of the parent, and yet people like mai’a seem to think that asking if her kid is coming is a crime.
Another certain truth would be that if you have kids, it is your responsibility to care for them, not the responsibility of others. By demanding that everyone send her “healing energy” when her kid is out of line Mai’a crossed the line from reasonable to unreasonable. Asking people to please be understanding in situations where the kid just loses it and is inconsolable? Reasonable. Demanding people respond in a certain manner if her kid acts out? Unreasonable.
That is what put people’s backs up. Personally I do try to be understanding in a situation such as you describe where you really couldn’t help your little one’s reaction, if however they’re howling the place down because they have the misfortune to have been born to a bad parent? I’m not going to be very understanding about the parents failure to actually parent. They took on the job, if they didn’t want to do said job, they shouldn’t have taken it on.
After all if I don’t want to be a ballerina, I’m not going to go to dance school and half-ass it, I’m going to do something else.
Dawn, I approved your comment with some reservations, since you said some pretty unreflective things about race at Feministe. Here, I’m going to simply declare race off the table, because my original post didn’t address it. (For the record, though, I hear the truth in it when bpf says her children get judged far more harshly than white kids. My kids, by contrast, get some benefit of the doubt by dint of being white. And that is appalling.)
You identify four types of people, but I don’t think the world is quite so simple. Most of the time, you’d probably categorize me as #2, but frankly, if you’d been in that plane, after six hours of misery you’d probably have categorized me as #1. The fallacy in categorizing people into those first two groups is that too often, people are judged by the momentary outcome of their parenting, not by the parent’s intent or efforts. If your kid is having a horrible day, you’ll look like parent #1.
Since I’ve been a parent myself, I’ve been slower to judge – for sure – because I know how hard it is to get it right, 24/7, for 18 years and beyond. I also know that some kids are easier than others. Some kids have outright disabilities that are not conducive to “good behavior.” All kids go through various phases and stages, and no parent is going to handle each “version” of their child with equal grace.
You say people in the fourth group are rare, but they sure aren’t on the Internet! I even encountered a few in the zoo today, of all places.
I also disagree with your characterization of the Feministe thread, which went beyond constructive criticism of the post (for an example of how to do that right, please see Karmythia’s post at Alas, which I linked in my post) and forged deep into judgmentalism. Also, I disagree with your characterization of Mai’a as asking everyone to share her parenting responsibility. I understood her as suggesting that instead of glares, one can respond as Erniebufflo described (see the first comment above). That’s not asking for co-parenting. As EB’s comment shows, even if the parent has dropped the ball, a kindhearted gesture can do a lot to protect the general peace.
Also: Parenting isn’t a job (though it requires a lot of work). It’s a complicated relationship and the biggest challenge I’ve ever faced. I’ve finished a Ph.D. Parenting is harder, in my experience. And by golly, even ballerinas get a few hours off. Parents rarely do. No one really knows what they’re getting into, unless their own childhood was cut short by having to parent younger sibs. I’m not making excuses for truly shitty parenting, but I’m also not willing to let anyone go judgmental in this thread. Your last two paragraphs cross this line, and I won’t permit further comments along those lines. We’re not going to do a repeat of the Feministe thread here.
[Material on race edited out, because as I said above, it's off-limits for this post. I'm on vacation with my family, I'm in Germany, and my computer is acting wonky, so I am unable to moderate very actively and therefore unwilling to host a meltdown on racial issues. Dawn, if you want me to remove the whole comment I will do so, but I will not restore your comments on race after I clearly stated that you were not to go there! -- Sungold]
Thank you for the assumption but, I’d have identified you as #2 since you were apparently trying your best not ignoring the kid. I only catergorise people as #1 if it’s so obvious that they don’t want to actually be a parent that anyone can tell.
The difference between caring and not caring is actually pretty obvious for anyone who cares to look. People can actually tell when you’re at the end of your tether and are doing your best, they can also tell when someone honestly doesn’t care at all.
I have a disability as well, I can usually spot the difference between a disabled kid and a kid who has a bad parent. Most honestly disabled children with good parents are actually much better behaved if anything.
I think you need to re-read Mai’as’ post and think about how she comes across and the language she used, she was lecturing and assuming left right and center. Basically there’s a difference between asking and demanding, mai’as’ post came off as the latter if anything.
There’s a difference between dropping the ball and a really bad parent. To be honest, I’m rather shy, it takes a lot of bad parenting for me to even let my discomfort show much less give a parent a dirty look, I usually move away unless I am unable to do so.
I myself helped raise my sibling and frequently babysat my cousins when they were little, so it’s not like I don’t have experience with the difference between kids that haven’t been parented and ones that are but just are having a meltdown.
I grew up with a variety of kids and some of them were parented, some weren’t, so I do know the difference between a parented kid and a half feral kid with a non-parent for a parent.
You’re right, parenting is a hard job, which kind of begs the question then why some people insist on taking it on and then ignoring it. If someone takes on a university course and doesn’t do any of the work needed for it? They’re going to fail, if they take on parenting and then don’t actually parent, the kid is going to be at an extreme disadvantage in life.
Again, I don’t think people realize just how hard it is until they’re in the thick of it – and then there’s no going back. This was likely clear to you precisely because you’d helped parent your own sib.
I have read Mai’a's post several times. I don’t see her as lecturing, though she took a strong stance. At any rate, I’m more interested in engaging with her ideas than reducing this to a “tone” argument.
And no, I don’t think anyone on that plane was capable of seeing my husband and my as type 2 parents after several hours of crying. This was an extreme situation, and it points out the blurriness of the boundaries between “good” and “bad” parenting, especially when the outcome loudly overwhelms parents’ good intentions.
Regarding disability: It depends on the disability. But I would never assume that an unfamiliar child having a meltdown was definitely neurotypical, for instance. A child with an ASD can get overwhelmed and the parent may not be able to help. I just can’t presume to know the backstory.
I certainly would have been quicker to judge 11 years ago, before I had my first baby. Now I know that “control” is neither possible nor desirable, some kids are just more volatile than others, and even subtle neurological differences can be hard to manage. (My younger son doesn’t have autism or any variant of it, but he talked late and does seem to have some issues with language processing … which may well have contributed to his fury on that flight, when he still had no words at 20 months.)
So pointing out the fact that some people see the issue as a global one and some people only look at how it impacts them and then try to apply it to everyone is somehow a meltdown? Thanks for the info, I would have never have known that acknowledging the facts rather than the rhetoric is a “meltdown”.
Demands are not ideas, public spaces are for all of us, one person does not get to push their expectations onto everyone else simply because they had a kid. That’s the thing, you’ve got two sides here.
The parent side who seem to believe that anything that disagrees with them is simply meanness.
And the otherside which consists of other parents and people without children who are tired of a subset of parents who seem to think that the needs of their child, manners and simply human consideration are all secondary to their wants.
She was lecturing, that’s why people responded so poorly because she came on as “you will do this, you can’t have this” and people pretty much felt that she was being bolshy. There’s a difference between asking for understanding and demanding a certain response, mai’a did the latter.
You weren’t talking about the people on the plane though, you were talking about me, and I told you that your assumption was wrong.
I have ASD, there are clear differences if you know what to look for. People without ASD might not see them but we do and the vast majority of children do not have ASD including quite a few whose parents claim they have it to “excuse” their lack of parenting.
I’m very tolerant but at the same time I find my tolerance stretched thin quite often by dealing with parents who think that reproducing makes them special and everyone who hasn’t done it or who doesn’t have a kid with them at that moment is a second class citizen.
No. An unmoderated discussion about race will become a meltdown if it follows in the tracks of the Feministe discussion. I’ve written other posts where I knew I’d be available to moderate more actively if needed. Thanks to my computer issues and the fact that my little family is gearing up to take yet another trans-Atlantic flight (not a luxury; my husband’s German mother is 84 and starting to show her age), I just can’t promise that I’ll be online to keep the discussion from turning ugly. Hence the ban – specific to this post – on discussing race. Civility matters to me.
Now you’re down to two sides, and I don’t think that’s helpful. People are more diverse than that.
If you really think you’d have categorized us as “parents trying their best,” then I have to give you props … because not a soul on that plane seemed to regard us that way. That puts you at about the 99.5th percentile for loving kindness!
Race doesn’t have to lead that way, I believe that it can be intelligently discussed, though I must admit that few people seem to be able to see the larger picture.
I meant two sides in this issue, the other side doesn’t feel they’ve done anything wrong whereas the rest of us are just fed up with people who don’t realise that parental privilege exists.
It’s hardly loving kindness, I simply believe in encouraging parents to do their best, even if they don’t manage to settle their child, the fact that they tried should still be appreciated and count towards something.
As I said, I reserve judgement for cases where parents clearly don’t give a hoot and expect the rest of us to forgive their lack of parenting.
Dawn, DROP the race talk or I’ll stop approving your comments.
There really are more than two sides to this. We’re looking at a spectrum of beliefs, behavior, philosophies, and actions – along with a huge dose of fate and luck, which doesn’t always correlate with our good intentions and hard work. As Laura says in the following comment, there’s a huge moderate ground. And I kiss that ground whenever I’m lucky enough to land on it.
So talking about the fact that a given subject can be discussed in an adult manner by most people is the same as talking about said subject?
While I respect your right to censor your blog as you feel, I think there’s a large difference between an actual meltdown that requires one to step in and commentary about whys and wherefores of issues. You can delete this out of my comment if you want since it’s mostly for you to see.
It’s still two sides when you get down to it, the privileged parental side and everyone else who is just tired of the extremist parents and their inability to share. Mai’as’ post was a slap in the face to everyone who wasn’t a parental extremist.
I see from other comments that you live in Germany, yet just recently there was: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,681951,00.html where apparently parents found it super offensive that a cafe extended it’s square footage to create a special quiet room for customers who wanted to eat and drink in peace. Apparently the fact that the parents weren’t losing anything was overlooked and it was still incredible “offensive” that the cafe had a special area.
Dawn, I’ve let everything you’ve written through *except* for material that I had pre-emptively said was off limits for this post. I offered you the option of removing that comment if you felt the edit distorted it. You didn’t take me up on that. Disallowing derails is not the same as “censoring.”
Broad, sweeping statements about Mai’a or her post are also not helping the discussion here, and I won’t allow any more of them. If you feel “slap[ped] in the face” by a blog post that presents a view contrary to your own, perhaps it’s time to take a break from reading feminist and political blogs.
One thing I’ve learned as a parent is that it’s entirely legit to draw reasonable limits and boundaries. (Of course, one can learn that lesson elsewhere, too; I learned it at the hands of my strong-willed kids.) And if people don’t respect those boundaries on my blog, well, Blogger and WordPress are free services; they can go start their own blog.
I’ve also learned that engaging with someone who’s only trying to provoke just encourages more of the same behavior. So I’m not going to continue engaging with you on derails.
Just FYI, I no longer live permanently in Germany. I’m here for a six-week stay. However, there’s not some upswell of outrage against the adults-only area of that cafe. Re-read the article. The proprietor says only a few of her customers have complained. The only real source of complaint is politicians concerned about Germany’s low birthrate. But a low birthrate is only a problem in a society that frowns on immigration. There’s plenty of anti-child sentiment here, too, but one cafe with a special quiet area strikes me more like a public library that has a children’s area. Not an issue, in my book. The Spiegel article is trying to stir up controversy.
Great post, Sungold.
The one piece of this that I’d say is a bit misleading, though, is where you quote Sierra:
This might be reasonable advice if you have the ‘female privilege’ of being implicitly trustworthy around children, but if you’re male and try to do the helpful, sensible thing with a child which is not your own (or, God forbid, try to “gently hold the kid accountable”), there’s the very real risk that you’ll be arrested and sent to jail. (h/t Danny)
Ballgame, you landed in my spam filter – I’m sorry! Anyway, yes, it’s absolutely harder for men to interact with children they don’t know. I agree absolutely that we need to resist the background assumption that men who do so have ulterior motives.
One thing my husband does a lot when there’s an upset toddler in the bus or subway is to play peekaboo. He’s never been accused of interfering, and it’s often been a great distraction. Obviously, if the kid doesn’t respond quickly, you need to assume they may be in a phase of stranger anxiety, and you stop trying to amuse them. But when it works, it’s magic. It helps to break down the idea that caring for wee ones is women’s work, while also undermining the stereotypes about men.
This is why I’ve given up on Feministe and Jezebel and similar blogs — their modus operandi seems to be, let’s post something really outrageous and then watch the fur fly. It makes me wonder whether their is a male chauvanist puppetmaster behind these blogs who likes to create and then watch cat fights!
Okay, in all seriousness, as someone who works in childhood studies I get and appreciate the point about children’s rights. [by the way I have no children myself]. However, rights need to be balanced with a child’s developmental stage. This is why, for example, we have film ratings, minimum ages for driving, and so forth. Sungold, you’re right, keeping your child up to the wee hours while you get sloshed in a bar is irresponsible parenting.
To add to the librarian’s story — my sister was a lifeguard at a the town pool. It was common for parents to drop their children off the day. When the pool closed because of thunderstorms my sister and the other guards had to track down the parents to come pick up their children (off the clock of course because the pool was technically closed).
You know, I rarely read comments unless I’m intending to comment myself … and I don’t comment as much as I’d like to. But now that we’re on summer break, I feel like I can squander some time here and there. (Also, the article I oughtta be working on is stagnating, since my always well behaved and delightful children tend to, ahem, interrupt. But that would be another discussion altogether!)
Both the library and pool problems sound to me as though they could be effectively addressed through policy. Our city pool, for instance, allows kids to be there without a parent beyond a certain age. I’m not sure what the age is – 10? 12? – since my kids don’t swim well enough for me to trust them alone there. But we get plenty of T-storms, and I can well imagine they cause similar problems for the pool staff. In your sister’s case, it seems like the pool should have either had a clear policy banning unaccompanied children, OR paid their employees for their supposedly “off-the-clock” work.
I do let my 10-year-old bike to our city library and check out books. I don’t let him stay and play on the computers. Some kids in his age group are allowed to do just that. If it’s a problem, again, the library should adopt a policy and post it prominently all around the computers. My guess is that there’s a disconnect between the decision-makers and the parents, with the library staff caught in the middle. If parents realize there’s a problem, most of them will modify their behavior. The few who don’t would get the point if they were called to come and pick up their kids. In any event, it sounds like the problems aren’t being communicated to the people who could actually ameliorate or solve them.
[...] Kittywampus (response to Feministe Child-free Spaces post): Feministe commenters pissed and moaned about kids [...]
If parents supervise the kids and they’re quiet, that’s fine. My 10-year-old would be fine with that; my 7-year-old would get antsy.
There’s the thing; you know what your kids can take and act accordingly. I think the little singer is four or five and she’s handles forty-five minutes in the university library fine, but kids obviously do not develop these abilities in step with one another. A fact that critics of children in public appear to be ignorant of.
My objection is to the way (here, at least, in my very child-friendly home town) many parents behave as if any place they take their child is automatically a playground, where it is perfectly appropriate for them to sit with their friends and talk while keeping a benign yet not particularly attentive eye on their kids while the kids laugh, shriek, and play tag around the restaurant tables. This is irritating.
It becomes restrictive when these ‘a playground is wherever I take my kids’ parents treat me with the same ‘creepy alert!’ reaction that I’d get for lurking around a real playground. It’d be kinda fun to be able to watch the playground without creeping people out and it’s a pity that’s not acceptable, but at least I am not encouraged to make a reservation there. If a business around here courts the patronage of parents by putting themselves forth as child-friendly the chances of it being a de facto playground, (complete with ‘get away perve!’ reactions to me) when I show up there leaps from perhaps 20% to 90%, unless they contain it in a specific children’s area, as the public library does.
The original post on Feministe seemed to me to be proposing, rather sweetly, that all of public life ought to be a de facto playground and everybody ought to be happy to participate in making it a safe and happy one, without any thought to the adults who’d get excluded from public life if this were the case.
I don’t sympathize with people who are irritated by crying kids on airplanes. Well, okay, they’re irritated, of course they are, but why whinge about it? Air travel is miserable. It would probably be less miserable if people would accept that it is miserable and stop trying to scapegoat babies and fat people for it. I sympathize with babies who are crying on airplanes, because air travel is miserable and I’m pretty sure the babies are just reacting to that, not trying to blame somebody. I’m a little autistic and once had an hour long helpless crying meltdown in an airport, at the age of 32. Sometimes I lose it and I can’t help it, and I can’t reschedule my flight for it. I’m sure it humiliates me a hell of a lot more than it discomfits others, and I’m also sure that the kid crying on the plane is more miserable than those who are listening, and can’t stop even if she understood that stopping would be nice and wanted to be nice to you. Bring headphones, you big self-controlled responsible adults.
Knitting Clio — Not a bit surprised about the lifeguard. I’ll do you one better: For a while in my late teens I used to dress up as a clown and make balloon animals at parades and stuff. I didn’t do this long because something horrific happened every time — I’d end up with a dozen kids following me, and when I wanted to leave I’d notice that I had no idea where their parents were. Shouting, “Hey! Guess what everybody! I’m GAY! Yes! GAY! It’s true! Bona fide homosexual right here! Gay every day!” would cause some of them to appear and take their kids away, but mostly I had to carefully interview each child as to the appearance of their parents and wander around asking, “Is that them?” until I found them all. It took hours.
Sungold —
I understand it’s a problem in almost every public library in the US. Usually it’s not that the kids are too young to be there by themselves. Like your ten-year-old, it’s perfectly appropriate. The problem is that, rather than the kids using the library as a resource for learning and recreational reading, the parents are using the library as a resource for free child care. Many (even most?) school age kids can handle spending a few hours at the library by themselves fine, and the library is prepared for that and expects it. But then there are kids who end up in a situation where they are at the library for four hours a day every day after school and perhaps all day on Saturday. It’s too much.
I can’t imagine a policy that’d fix that without restricting library use for kids who might want to spend hours every day there because they like to or are doing work. And public libraries are really serious about serving everyone equally, kids included.
The problem is a lack of affordable child-care options, and librarians generally know it and don’t blame the kids or the parents who misuse the library this way. Affluence of the library’s neighborhood and the availability of Boys and Girls Clubs and other after-school activity stuff makes a big dent in the problem.
Great post Sungold and I totally agree though I usually agree with you so what else is new? I have not been over to Feministe recently so I missed the shit storm. I honestly don’t get why people are upset by children in airplanes. The last time I flew it was without children and when I heard a baby cry somewhere on the plane, I thought to myself that it wasn’t my problem and I tuned it out.
Most importantly, (as you said) children are people too and not flying is not an option for many people. For people who don’t have kids: you were a child once, so have some empathy or at least some tolerance.
Heh. You and I are getting into groupthink. That can’t be good either!
I totally get what you mean about hearing babies cry. I just feel a wave of sympathy for the parent, and then a rather larger wave of relief that it’s not my problem!
As for folks without children: Well, the ones with zero tolerance come from the Matrix. They were borne of pods. That’s why they were always perfectly behaved, themselves, as children. And that’s what qualifies them to judge the rest of us.
HAHAHA!
Coupla general points about air travel, which seems to provoke the most bile, at least judging by Internet commentary:
Grafton is exactly right, I think, in saying that noisy kids on a plane become a proxy (along with fat people) for all that’s wrong with air travel these days. Unless you’re in first class, you’re stuffed in like a sardine, starved for food (because you never know what the TSA will let through, and domestic flights make you pay for homeopathic doses of cheese and crackers), and confronted with understandably grouchy flight personnel. Add in some delays, some dysfunctional AC and an out-of-service toilet (just to cite my last flight), and people sink to their least kindly selves.
K mentioned above that she was on a flight where a family apparently hadn’t planned ahead and therefore had seats all over creation. This has happened to my little four-person family repeatedly, and it seems to have *no* correlation to how early we’ve booked. Some flights won’t allow you to reserve specific seats. Others are highly restrictive about what’s available. You can book three months ahead and not even find seats for two family members together! The ground crew has *no* power to try to fix this prior to boarding (or else they pretend so, since a fix would require a lot of effort from them). The seats still open tend to be either premium leg-room seats (at an additional price) or exit row (where kids are barred). Instead, we’re always told we need to go to our seats and then beg other passengers to swap. And so we have to ask complete strangers for mercy. So far, they all seem to realize that sitting next to the Tiger, unaccompanied, would not be a good deal for them. They recognize that a seven-year-old, no matter how cute, is unlikely to stay that cute through even a short flight. And so people will swap. It gets tougher, though, if all we can offer is middle seats. This problem *never* arose until about three or four years ago, by the way, and I’m not sure why it’s such a pervasive problem now. Having observed other families boarding, I can assure you that it *is* pervasive.
Also, a lot of airlines have eliminated the chance for families with strollers to board early. This only increases the chaos and headaches for everyone, including the childfree travelers.
Finally, I think airlines ought to be obligated to supply noise-blocking headphones for every flight. This would ratchet down the tension for everyone – including the flight crew. Barring that, I encourage everyone to buy their own. My husband even has his own set. I don’t; one of us has to be ready to respond to the kids before they get loud. But you’d better believe I’m planning to get the best model on the market in 2020, when the Tiger will be 17.
Don’t want to wade into this whole debate, as I don’t have much to add (I have a 4-year-old going through a pretty difficult period that includes some pretty bad behavior, and I always feel humiliated when he acts up in public and sure that everyone is judging me, and all I can say is that we’re trying and we’re working on it). Just want to bitch about flying with kids (my own!) in this day and age. The last time we were coming back on a cross-country flight, we spent an hour and a half on the run way on the first flight. We went through all our snacks, ran out of time to get food between flights during our lay-over (my husband almost missed boarding AND lost his money at the fast-food place he was trying get us food at), then on the second flight, they didn’t even have snack food to buy. I had to get my then-2 1/2-year-old through a 2 1/2-hour flight with nothing but soda and pretzels! We did plan ahead, just not well enough.
Well, I think you *did* just contribute something important. Sometimes, you can try all you want, and a kid is just stuck in a stage for a while. Sometimes you think they’re past that stage, and they dip back into it again, temporarily.
There’s no necessary correlation between effort and good will, on the one hand, and a child who’s easy-going and socially adept, on the other. Again, I just can’t say enough bad things about the illusion that we can and should “control” our children. We do our best. And I really do see *most* people doing the same.
I’ll be getting on a plane in 36 hours, and I bought snacks today, plus we’ll let the kiddos watch all the Sponge Bob they want on the long flight. Nonetheless, they’ll be tired by the last leg (JFK to Columbus) after crossing the Atlantic, and we have a tight connection at JFK, and I’m already envisioning all the worst-case scenarios. Previous fond memories of JFK include nearly getting stuck there for the night, employees threatening to call security on my husband (for simply asking about the status of our cancelled flight), the Bear bursting into tears thinking his daddy was about to be arrested – and we were lucky that we arrived only after a flood had hit the baggage area and tornadoes had touched down in Brooklyn!
Oh, I need to stop dwelling on this, drink a glass of wine, and hope for the best.
Anyway, Chingona, there’s a limit to how much anyone *can* anticipate. It sounds like you did all you could with the cards you were dealt. Good for you. At least your child was willing to go for the soda! Mine both hated anything fizzy at that age.
Crashing the party a little late. (Not to be confused with the disorderly drunk on a plane.)
Love this post! It perfectly articulates the moderate view, in which the interests of all parties are balanced and common sense (gasp!) is applied.
As for the extremists, they are: on one end, the zealous advocates of child free zones, and on the other, child-centric parents who behave as though the sun rises and sets around John or Jane. If you were to say, you have to spend the rest of your life on a deserted island with an extremist from one of those two camps, I’d have to go with the child-free advocate. And I have children. In other words, I get it. Child-centric parenting is out of control, and it gives the rest of us a bad name.
But if you were to say, what do you believe, I’d say moderation and common sense, all the way.
You can be a disorderly drunk on my blog – as long as you’re a cheerful and civil one.
If I were on a deserted island with either type of extremist, I’d start paddling. And as my long-time friends know … um … I can only dog paddle.
I’m wondering two things. First, are the entitled parents concentrated in American cities? Because I just don’t see it in my small midwestern college town. I see only traces of it here in Berlin, where the condemning glances far outweigh any parental privilege or prerogative.
And secondly, a more personal question to you, Laura, which you should cheerfully ignore if you want: How do you navigate the world with a little boy who’s cute as the dickens but not quite neurotypical? Again, ignore this if it’s too personal. I don’t want to put you on the spot. But I am genuinely interested in your experiences.
Ha! Good answer. As for entitled parents, I dunno, it may be cultural, rather than geographic. It may be Jewish. I can say that because I am Jewish, perhaps a self-loathing Jew. I don’t have it in me to deconstruct The Jewish Mother (that might require therapy sessions), so I’ll just leave it at speculation.
As for your second question, I just don’t know. I haven’t had the dilemna yet. We do go to nice restaurants with the children. We just exercise common sense, and go during the 5:00 hour and limit it to restaurants that actually have kid menus. The children behave and we’re usually not intruding upon the romantic dinner/intimate crowd at 5:00. Common sense. One parent I know whose child is classically autistic tends to avoid public. Even parks. Sadly.
Nah, it’s not just a Jewish thing, because I’ve seen entitled parents here in Germany too, where odds are pretty low that they’re zero.
Going early is a trick we’ve used too. There’s a little pizzeria a block from our apartment here in Berlin that offers a Happy Hour – but it’s pizzas, not drinks, that are on special. Almost all of their (very large, “individual-sized”) pizzas go for 3 euros each. That’s less than $4. The whole family eats for less than you’d spend at McDonald’s. Of course we order a few drinks and make sure to tip a little extra. The restaurant’s real business takes off around 8, when it’s packed with adults. This works out wonderfully for everyone involved.
It would be awful to feel that you couldn’t even go to the park. I am so sorry to know that some people are having to live like that.
Ditto. I’m autistic. I used to be the autistic child. I’m generally very quiet, as was my younger brother. We were like 9 and 12 or so when we were taken to restaurants and ate the grown-up courses.
The full flavour of real food as compared to the junk they sometimes serve as ‘kids’ menu’ was all that was needed to occupy me.
I’m still like that. Sensory stimulus overrides the rest, so if something tastes good to me, and there’s a lot of taste to savour then I’m busy with that. I have serious problems, also as an adult, with holding any sort of conversation while eating. I either talk or dine – not both.
I don’t go to parks. When mum took me for walks as a child we went to the local cemetary (really park-like) because it was a quiet place with nature all around. No playgrounds, no boisterous kids. Just us. I wasn’t diagnosed as a child, but I think mum knew which place was the best for me – even if she didn’t quite know why.
The public is hell for people with sensory disabilities – including autistics. And thus I avoid places where people get drunk, places where people listen to music, places where there are children playing, places where people watch sport. And ALL public transport whenever possible.
And if I’m in one of those places it’s because there is a necessity, and if a child has a meltdown I won’t be sending any warm vibes or whatever, because I have none when I’m probably feeling much the same as the poor child.
Hm. I live in a city of about four hundred and twenty thousand people. It might be that the fact that it is the ‘Mecca’ of the Christian right may influence the amount of entitled parent behavior. I can see how the idea that marriage and children are the most important thing to do, coupled with the idea that people outside one’s religious group are damned and bad, would lead to that.
I work in a bigger city with a different demographic, but I’m usually in the wrong places to see kids with their parents. The exception being the natural history museum, where they run around the fossil dinosaurs, slam into people and climb the railings. Very sad since as a kid I loved that place, but the new mode-of-behavior in there would have made it miserable for me.
I wonder how much of the response to autistic children in public is anti-child sentiment, how much is the odd way people have of supposing that one encounter is a reason to judge a person’s parenting skills as a whole, and how much is just that ‘Autism Speaks’ etc seem determined to tell parents that autistic kids are an embarrassment. I’ve never had a parent apologize to me for their child interrupting a professional conversation (always conducted for the benefit of the parent, so why should they?) but I did have one once apologize that the child was autistic, even though it was I who essentially invited him to have his own reference interview. Maybe I am supposed to be disturbed by lack of eye-contact and largely-non-verbal conversation?
I’ve no memory of adult glares as a child, but I don’t read facial expressions well. I do remember my parents informing my that I was embarrassing, which was painful.
I dunno. I tend to think that entitled parents were often previously entitled non-parents. Perhaps any worldview that convinces you you’re always in the right will breed entitlement? And if your worldview emphasizes reproduction, sure, I can see how that could breed some real self-righteousness. But I definitely wouldn’t localize obnoxious entitlement to the CHristian right anymore than I would pin it mainly on parents or on the childfree.
I don’t have a good fix on the public reponse to autistic children, but it sounds to me like you’ve named a bunch of toxic elements that cook up into a really nasty stew. I am really, really sorry that your parents told you that you were embarrassing. Parents often feel powerless when they don’t know how to react … and then it’s so easy to react foolishly or harmfully, perhaps having no clue how much power they (we) are in fact exercising over our kids. Anyway, I am sorry you had that experience. It sounds very hurtful indeed.
Yes. I didn’t mean to imply that entitlement is universal to, or restricted to, the Christian right. Just that the presence of that demographic might explain why it seems to be such a prevalent thing where I live. It’s a pretty affluent end of the city, too, so there’s the wealth-entitlement stuff as well.
I’m really not capable of making a good assessment of how it child-centric/entitled-parent stuff measures against anti-child sentiment, though, since it sounds as if anti-child feelings are expressed in public with dour looks and I usually fail to read the facial expressions of strangers.
My parents had a rough time. I cannot guess whether it was made worse by fact that at the time none of the ‘a little autistic’ dxs were really in use, so they got the conflicting, “You’re great, your kid is gifted!” and “You suck, your kid is emotionally disturbed!” messages and none of the specific supports that are available now, or whether they were better off not trying to raise me in the midst of the loopy OMFG AWTISM! GENERATION LOST! HORROR! thing that’s going on now.
Let’s also remember that sometimes the parent is autistic, and sometimes the one that responds to children’s behaviour are autistic.
If people touch me unannounced I either freeze up and my stomach curls up into a tight little ball with the mass of a black hole or I smack them. It’s an auto-reaction. I don’t think about it and it happens no mater who touches me, because I don’t register who it is, I only register the touch.
I haven’t ever smacked a child. I have come close, though. Because the boy’s father, who knew I dislike being around children and have no particular maternal instinct or coo-reaction, thought it would be supremely funny to sneak around my back and hold the then 3 year old boy in my face and dump him on my lap.
Ohhhhh the fun which was had at the horrified and panicky look on my face. Great cheer was had for his magnificently humourous stunt, which caused great mirth for everyone. And really, weren’t I just being oversensitive? It’s just a child. It’s just a person. Really. They had seen me smiling at him, so surely I must secretly love children.
Yes, I had smiled at the kid, ’cause I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable when I was the guest in THEIR home. It doesn’t harm me to be nice. But the behaviour of the parents? ARGH!
And yes, it’s just a child. Yes, the boy is just another person. But I SMACK adult persons who touch me without permission, and I do so because it shuts down all reasonable thought in triggers my fight or flight reaction. Especially so when it is unannounced. (over the years I’ve mostly learned to handle prepared-for touches like shaking hands and such).
I have been touched by little kids in public as well. I have seen it coming, braced for impact, and looked at them unfriendlily. And when they go away because I didn’t want to play or indulge their desire to touch a strange woman’s breasts their (supposedly) moms have stared angrily at me for not indulging their precious little ones.
I don’t go to parks as an adult either.
Unless I have woken up with twice the normal amount of spoons and feel like burning a few on a little human interaction, which I don’t get much of.
That is horrible. I am lucky in that my meds make me more tolerant of touch (in spite of the fact that they also make me twitch harder when it happens) but I’d still hate it if somebody did that, and be furious if somebody did it because they think it’s funny to torment me.
Jemima, I don’t know what it feels like to walk in your shoes. You describe it very vividly, and I thank you for sharing an inkling of your experience, but it would be arrogant for me to presume that I can fully imagine how awful unwanted contact feels for you.
So just let me say I’m appalled that your friend (!?!) thought that it would be a funny trick to drop his child on you. I can’t see how it would be fun even for his (presumedly neurotypical) kid. Toward you, it just seems cruel.
I thank both you and Grafton for your willingness to describe your experiences. The media is full of chatter about autistic children, and yet there’s so little space accorded to autistic adults. There’s rarely even acknowledgement that you exist (beyond Temple Grandin, that is). So I’m grateful for your willingness to speak out.
I will probably not delve back into this thread for the next couple of days, as I’ll be traveling, but if you continue the conversation, I wouldn’t want you to feel it’s unappreciated due to my silence.
I really wish there were some way to communicate that some people truly *need* more physical (and possibly emotional) space than others. I can’t imagine anything that wouldn’t be laden with stigma. Right now, though, in public settings signals get crossed all the time, and it’s too bad. If I knew a stranger on the subway would react like Jemima Aslana, I would take care to put some space between her and my 7-year-old, who tends to yell more than he talks. (Yes, we’re working on that too.) Problem is, it’s impossible to distinguish different “flavors” of dirty looks. Not blaming you at all for using the only strategy that works in public without creating a real drama. Only regretting that we don’t have better ways of meeting everyone’s needs.
If I knew a stranger on the subway would react like Jemima Aslana, I would take care to put some space between her and my 7-year-old,
Mm. I suppose that part of the entitlement thing is that entitled people presume that there is no legitimate reason to want that space, and that those who need it don’t have a need, just a selfish and anti-social desire. I could certainly quote the Feministe thread to support this theory.
Not all that different from being autistic every day in general. There is a strong tendency for people to presume that it’s hyperbole when I explain my limitations — eg.“I can barely function on the telephone most of the time, and I simply cannot understand people or speak coherently to them over the phone if I’m trying to do it in a room where three other conversations are happening,” gets translated into, “I am a self-centered jerk who thinks he is too good to cover for the receptionist’s lunch break,” and I am told, “You’ll get used to it,” and then chewed out for failing at the job in exactly the way I said I would.
An unexpected touch feels to me almost identical to a low-power agricultural electric fence, one that’s maybe .75 joules. It doesn’t exactly hurt, but the sensation is intolerably unpleasant and it makes me feel as if all my erector spinae just twanged like a rubber band. But Jemima very likely has a somewhat different experience.