The Penalty Box

It saddens me every time I see a parent take the lazy way out and, in essence, hand power over to the child.  I was on the bus and observed a particularly whiny brat refusing to sit down.  The mother attempted to threaten the child with a typical “If you don’t sit down right now, we’re getting off and going home.” Result? Child begins screaming. Flustered, the mother then says, “if you sit down, I’ll give you a lollipop.” Wait, what? Did she just positively reinforce bratty behaviour? Here’s what’s wrong with this picture:

• If your kid begins screaming in public and you get embarrassed, you shouldn’t be having kids to begin with.  The people on the bus don’t know you and almost assuredly will never see you again. Why do you care what they think if your kid is screaming? Go yank out your balls/uterus right now. Please avoid further polluting the gene pool.
• Bailing out on a threat teaches your kid that whatever you say you’ll do, you’ll never actually do. If you don’t actually get off the damn bus, he knows he just has to carry on screaming just a little bit longer and he’ll get away with it.
• Bribing him to sit down teaches him one thing: if he screams enough, he gets candy. You’re rewarding him for being an asshole.

Kids are, in general, assholes. That’s because they don’t know any better. It’s the job of parents to tell them when they’re being assholes and then teach them how NOT to be assholes. I liken it to training a dog not to pee in the house or chew on the slippers. Yuppie parents will complain that their children are special, not some kind of animal. Well, last I checked, homo sapien was part of Kingdom Animalia (see, here’s my grade school biology being useful here, who needs Wikipedia?), and, just like your pet dog, kids need to be taught right from wrong.

When you threaten your child when he’s acting up, you bloody well better follow through on it. The best example of this I’ve seen recently was during a Canucks game I attended.  Some little twerp a couple rows up from my seat was kicking the back of the seat in front of him. His father twice told him to stop kicking, and on the third time threatened to take him home if he didn’t stop. Defiant to the last, the kid decided to kick the seat again. The father picked up his son in one arm, jackets in the other and left the game. In the first period. So let’s see, the dad was out something like $130 ($65 a ticket roughly, given the seating area), plus the parking, and he missed getting to see the game live in the arena. Worth it to teach his son a lesson? Absolutely. I don’t think that kid will be such a jackass at a hockey game again. That kid on the bus? He’ll pull the exact same stunt again because his mother would rather cave than to put up with a few strange looks.

Childhood is all about trying things out and learning how the world works.  If throwing a tantrum results in getting candy, further tantrums will result with the end goal of getting candy. If a parent stands unyielding through a tantrum, the lesson is tantrums are ineffective at achieving any goal, so they stop happening (or at the very least, they cut short fairly quickly). Know what happens if tantrums are rewarded? You get that jackass who is throwing a fit in Starbucks because that $6 latte was made with 2 pumps of foam instead of 3 and I’ll have you fired for this you dumb minimum wage monkey DON’T YOU KNOW HOW MUCH MORE I MAKE THAN YOU??!!

This just makes me feel like the Grumpy Old Man switch in me has been flipped a little too early. I need to go laugh at everyone older than me and prank one of my co-workers. This maturity crap ought to be handled by someone with real responsibilities.

You know, like a parent.