Anyone who thinks their children are “like the weather” has no freaking clue how to discipline and remain in control. You’re kids have no right to invade or disturb other people’s space. If their having a bad night, get your food to go. End of story. I have seen too many well behaved children to have patience with the one’s whose parents think their s*** doesn’t stink. If you want to let your kid run the house, fine, but that dynamic needs to stay in your house.

Anyone who thinks their children are “like the weather” has no freaking clue how to discipline and remain in control. You’re kids have no right to invade or disturb other people’s space. If their having a bad night, get your food to go and GTFO. End of story. I have seen too many well behaved children to have patience with the one’s whose parents think their shit doesn’t stink. If you want to let your kid run the house, fine, but that dynamic needs to stay in your house.

Bottom line is, your kids are only special TO YOU. I see only spit-covered, dirty, rude, obnoxious hellions with inconsiderate, self-absorbed parents who can’t be bothered to disrupt their own dinners to take responsibility for their child’s actions. And honestly, if you discipline them at home and teach them from birth on to be respectful (yes, newborns can be disciplined age-appropriately), that shouldn’t even be an issue. Parents today just have no respect for others or for their own jobs as the caretakers of tomorrow’s leaders.

Frankly, I shudder at the thought of what I’ve sworn myself to defend.

The kids probably weren’t that noisy, you just had a bad hangover. I realize that you probably dealt with your own kids by drinking heavily and then beating them senseless, just like your father did to you. Unfortunately, that’s now frowned upon. You can blame those damn “liberals”.

Let’s get together soon for a few drinks. We can bitch about kids, drugs, and liberals, while we drive around town drunk.

Cheers.

I’d rather sit by a fun (however noisy) little kid than a grumpy old man.

For the record, a newborn gets a free pass from me, but the parent should still remove them from most public situations if they act up.

In fact, he only throws temper tantrums at home where it is actually easy to discipline with timeouts.

That said, I was raised to not get away with being a brat and my kids won’t either.

(not hitting … not abuse … just the hand of discipline applied to the seat of knowledge.)

Combined with consistent and enforced expectations, there’s nothing like it.

If your kids can’t go places without causing a scene, don’t go out. No one forced anyone to have kids.

Otherwise, I will give you a damn good dressing down if your rude children interrupt my night at the movies, my meal at a restaurant, flight or wherever the venue might be.

Too many parents see the crappy behavior of their kids as somehow endearing, and are somehow oblivious to how annoying those ‘endearing’ little tantrums can be to the rest of us. Those kids are terrors because they have no fear of their parents, and that is a result of their parents being too wimpy to discipline them. Someone once said that children are born barbarians, and as parents, our job is to civilize them. After four kids, I can vouch for the truth in that.

I feel so…left out.

Well, at least I’m not bitching for once!

(Nelson-style HA-HA!)

Kids belong where kids belong, and no where else.

They don’t belong on airplanes under the age of 4 (or very short trips only please) and only if well behaved (any age). They don’t belong in nice, expensive restaurants. Go to Chuck E Cheese or Red Robin if you let your kids scream, rant and play Nintendo at the table. If YOU want a nice dinner, get a babysitter! Do not bring a child to a late movie that is rated PG-13 and up. You will earn every glare you receive.

When I went to see the latest Batman, a couple brought in two boys, dressed as Batman, no older then 8. Idiots. The next day in my local paper, people were complaining that the Batman movie wasn’t appropriate for kids. Duh. Just becuase you get pregnant doesn’t mean you know anything about raising kids well. Dogs get knocked up all the time. It takes thoughtful, mature adults to raise a child.

I enjoy a good sushi dinner and I marvel at the kids who go to my neighborhood place. They try a variety of things to eat and are well behaved. There must be something about parents/families who are open minded about food. Those kids make me smile. Kudos!

Thank goodness for the parents who get this. I thank you. THANK YOU! For the few who are idiots and decided to procreate, go home already and get a pack of condoms while you are on your way.

Three examples…

Our school has recently planted some willow withies. Next day, children waiting for the school doors to open were pulling them up – right in front of their parents.

A parent comes to the head worried about her child who is scared of spelling tests. Head teacher brings in the child’s homework book, which has all the words expected to be learned for the next test – and no sign of the homework ever having been done.

I politely hand a crisp packet back to a child who has thrown it on the floor and get a mouthful of abuse from both parents.

I try to get ours to behave in public and sometimes they let us down. But at least they /know/ we feel let down and we have standards from which to be let down!

However, I would also like to mention that there is a worse problem facing our public places; and that is the plague of Adult Douchbagery.

The amount of times I have been forced to listen to adults, who should be held more accountable than parents for children, being loud and obnoxious at restaurants. Is it not a worse offence to have a perfectly good meal sullied by the arrogant, overly loud conversations from douche bag adults? Really, there is not doubt they should know better.

Now, I am not saying Mr. Cafferty is one of these people, I am just saying I’m sure he has endured more of them than loud kids. Why single out the kids?

“It takes a lot of planning and consistency to make kids good kids. But most people just don’t have the personal discipline to be consistent or plan accordingly, making everyone share their bad decisions. After all is a collective society effort!

Deal with it!”

I loved how the blatant sarcasm of your closing sentence captures the irony of brats raising brats.

Very interesting post by the way.

Went to see The Exorcist when it was re-released and there was a couple with two little kids, like five or so, there. They got to the point where Regan was jabbing her vagina with the crucifix and then got up and left. Least they didn’t scream.

I like to sit in the bar area in mixed clientele restaurants so I don’t have to deal with kids.

Thanks for proving my point.

Most people, including non-attractive intellectually challenged people mate eventually. Reproducing is even easier, that’s why there is so much teenager pregnancy. Why did you try to make this sound any special?

Special and rare is a person/couple that takes full responsibility for their decisions instead of taking for granted that other people have to participate in case something ill planned went wrong.

And by the way I don’t think anybody demonstrated sour dispositions to mates, just to other people bratty kids.

Once I saw a couple in a transatlantic flight, with one kid only. They clearly checked as much luggage as they could so they could easily manage their little stuff and the kid’s stuff. They were telling the kid that that was the kids seat as they rehearsed, he had to stay there and be polite to other people as they discussed. The kid was 2-3 y old, had one toy only and the mom had a little DVD player to play his shows. Everything went smooth in a 9h flight. The kid complained a little at some point, parents were attentive but assertive, it went away, and everything went smoothly.
But this was the exception.

Many times kids outnumber parents and help, they are all packed with a lot of stuff what causes stress to everyone and the kid, sometimes they don’t have seats for all kids thinking that they will manage a long flight with kids switching laps.

Once a lady came into the plane late with 2 kids, didn’t have contiguous seats. She made 2 people who had isles or windows move to middle seats b/c the kids wanted to stay with their mommy. You buy your tickets in advance, you arrive at the airport early and you have to stay 5 hours squished in a middle seat b/c some Mom you don’t know couldn’t plan her trip.

Then there was this 5-6 year old kid who was screaming the whole flight, obviously old enough to understand planes, but brat enough not to care. And the parents phased out and let the kid scream until he got tired, 3hs later.

It takes a lot of planning and consistency to make kids good kids. But most people just don’t have the personal discipline to be consistent or plan accordingly, making everyone share their bad decisions. After all is a collective society effort!

Deal with it!

And it’s amusing that this current fussy old man has the schmesticles to start by saying that he was a drunk who was lucky to have a saintly wife to raise his kids for him, and then turns around and complains about the parenting skills of others.

Flying sucks, and we pay for that suckage to get from point a to point b. We don’t need for it to suck more because some poor excuse for a parent can’t keep their child in check. We didn’t breed them.

“Deal with it” is not appropriate. One child can ruin the flight experience for hundreds of people, and yet the parents do nothing about it. Nothing like a crying baby at 1:00am on a transatlantic flight.

There’s two things people need to realize:

For people who don’t have them, kids are going to be kids. They’re erratic. With younger children, they don’t know how to control the level and the variance of their emotions.

For people that do have them, the above doesn’t absolve you from action or discipline. Yeah, it’s hard. It’s really hard. But just because the sun rises and sets for you with your children you have to realize that it doesn’t hold true for the rest of us (even those of us with children), and you aren’t doing your kids any favors by making them think so.

Toodles.