CNN commentator Jack Cafferty is mad. Steaming mad. At your bratty kids for disturbing his meal.
In his new book, Now or Never: Getting Down to the Business of Saving Our American Dream, Cafferty writes that though education is in a sorry state, parenting is even worse:
Exhibit A: My wife and I have just been seated for dinner when the maitre d' walks over and seats a young family at the table next to us and the kids start carrying on like orangutans on a leash.
The parents are going, "Timmy, that's not nice, don't throw your food, stop stuffing your mashed potatoes up your nose." Are mom and dad having fun yet, picking food up off the floor, apologizing to people like us, and wiping food flung across the table off their faces?
Some parents still have this attitude that their kids are too special to be burdened by discipline. And the rest of us are supposed to put up with their little mutants. That attitude really pisses me off.
I hate to break it to them, but the kids aren't special, and I don't have to put up with their behavior. If you can't control your obnoxious little brats, leave them home.
No, seriously, I've never heard of the guy.
Anyway, he needs to get over himself because he's clearly not that special himself. ...maybe thats why he's so crabby.
Yeah, you can go home you miserable old jackass.
He's just jealous that he can't make any baby Cafferty's because his balls don't work anymore.
No, seriously, I’ve never heard of the guy."
He is on CNN every day and has been a reporter for 35 years. If you aren't at all involved with the news maybe you should be.
Their parents would allow their children to run wild and just come up and grab our food displays. The good parents would show their child responsibility and consequences by immediately making their child pay for the item or watch them pay for the food item as a parental figure.
The bad parents would blame me, for what??? i never could figure out.
If i had grabbed their child's hand i would have been arrested, so i never did that. I tried to put the baked goods out of range of children but i had to make them accessible to adults and that height line is not black and white, plus i also have make sure people in wheelchairs can reach things too. I have had parents tell me "People in wheelchairs don't have money."
(Our federal Congressman is in a wheelchair and a cherished customer i would reply to their red faces.)
Even when i politely as i could tried to express to parents that even if their child returned the baked good I had to throw it out, i had a mother call me a piece of shit in front of her child. This is the same mother that insisted everything be organic.
HER CHILD MUST HAVE ORGANIC but someone else's child can eat the dirty scone that her kid touched with his snot covered hands and sneezed on????
Was i to blame because i sold baked goods? That i was even at a public market? When i was told i should have signs telling other people's children how to behave in public, i put up "Don't touch" signs and I quickly figured out how few of the grabby children could actually read even at age 11. And yes these were white RICH kids and yes they did say their child was "Gifted" or an "Honor student"
That is what we are up against.
Why when i click on your name does it connect to THINGAMABAY!!?!?!?
Don't You make you living from children?
C'mon. Stop fronting.
Never saw a brat in a restaurant? What about planes? In every single flight there's always a kid that screams for an hour straight. What about malls, subways, movies,... ?
The problem is that people pretend that there's nothing one can do about brat kids, and everybody is supposed to put up with it because either they have kids and abused other peoples patience before, or will have kids and will need their tolerance in the future.
There isn't anything you can do after the kid becomes a brat and completely loses respect for their parents, who are insecure and afraid if they don't give in to the kid's demands they won't love them. Kids have to be taught and disciplined from the beginning for their own good and to become responsible children and then better citizens. And until the kid can be trusted or if they fail to behave afterwards, by all means leave them home.
"He’s just jealous that he can’t make any baby Cafferty’s because his balls don’t work anymore."
The problem is not that Mr Cafferty or somebody else can't have kids, but that everybody, even somebody that posts an answer like quoted above can.
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Hi, I’m AJ. I am a writer and photographer dad working from home in northern California. My wife is a university nursing instructor and a labor and delivery nurse. We share parenting duties.
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We do our best to use 'common-sense parenting' when it comes to taking this tornado of youthful exuberance out in public. We don't go to movies. We do go to restaurants. We also fly on airplanes.
When choosing a restaurant, we generally assess the mood of the boys at the time and pick something that is appropriate. Had a bad day and no nap? We may not even go out. On the other hand, if they're acting reasonably well-behaved, we may go so far as a local Thai restaurant that has a somewhat grownup clientele with the suggestion that good behavior will net an ice cream afterward.
95% of the time, this strategy results in success. We even get comments from waitstaff and other diners as to how well-behaved our children are.
However, no matter how hard we try at this sort of risk-management, there are occasions where their behavior is not appropriate to the situation. It's like trying to predict the weather - sometimes despite trying your hardest, you get it wrong. In these cases, the people around us are mostly understanding and at least appreciate our predicament. I don't doubt though, that there are some who allow their dinner to be ruined due to their annoyance. To these people I say, "Get over it."
There's a difference between always hauling your terrible children to 5-star restaurants without regard for others, and doing what we do. As long as we are making reasonable efforts to keep from imposing on others, I believe that people should be understanding that life is not perfect.
Some may say, "If you have small children, then just don't ever go out in public." If we all lived our lives that way, where we never did anything with the slightest element of risk, then guess what? Nobody would ever ride in a car because there's that small chance that something might happen. Heck, we wouldn't even step foot outside our front doors. A big part of life is risk management.
I know that situations such as dining in a restaurant are essentially an interaction between strangers, and that people may not know the measures we take to avoid imposing on their dining experience. Those that become annoyed probably assume the worst and think that we're just rotten parents with rotten kids. However, the vast majority of parents think along similar lines as we do. The odds are that if that kid next to you is having a bad night, his parents honestly didn't think that he would. Parents aren't stupid. They don't want to deal with bad behavior in public any more than you do. Most likely, that night out just wound up being an outlier on the bell curve of their risk-management scheme. Given that the majority of parents are trying, people would do well to give them the benefit of the doubt. Having a loud kid at the table next to you is like having a thunderstorm roll in on you at a theme park. Do your best to enjoy your time anyway, and hope it turns out better next time.
As for airplanes, last I checked there was no such thing as a 'no-kids-allowed' section of the airplane, and *not* flying just isn't a reasonable option for a lot of families. Crabby kids are often part of flying, deal with it. One day, if these people manage to find a mate and reproduce despite their sour dispositions, they'll feel the same way.
I like the weather prediction part, so true ; my 4 1/2 boy and and my 3 years old girl agree with you!
Being parents is to teach rules, but being kids is to find where the line is drawn : to find it, you need to cross it...
WHAT are your children doing up at 12:22am?
You are full of it. You are speaking through your children using them as human shields for your own blarney.
Using your children as pawns is shameful
Shame on you.
I have 3 kids. I don't go to the movies. I don't go to restaurants. I don't fly. Sure, that makes me sound like a good parent, but the fact is I never did the latter two when I wasn't a parent.
Scuppy, you're a douche BTW.
Scuppy is just trying to get a reaction. I wouldn't take the bait if I were you...
In other words, "don't feed the troll". :)
I don't think much of this kind of argument. Yes, kids can be annoying, but they're members of society too. Adults can't just wall them out of public places.
Sounds like this is about selfish self absorbed parents more than bad kids.
Like Scuppy said this isn't about bedtimes it's about using your children as pawns for your own desires and it looks like someone got pwned on their pawning.
I wasn't talking about bedtimes.
I was calling out plasmator for putting words in his/her children's mouths.
plasmator's children didn't read this thread. He made up his "facts" to get his own way. He spoke for his children and represented his will as their's online. That is manipulative and now he's angry. Because he's been caught in a lie.
But i guess you feel attacked because you let you kids stay up late. It's your conscience.
i don't care when your kids go to bed.
-W.C. Fields
Sorry to plasmator.
i confused that post with the one where Christophe speaks for his kids.
I guess it is past my bed time.
I couldn't agree more. I absolutely *&#$ing HATE it when I go to a nice restaurant to have a nice dinner with my wife and some IDIOT parents let their kids literally run around wild. And, if I say anything about it then I'm rude? Seems so... Everyone's little snot nosed brat is supposedly "special", but really half of them ought to get run over by cars or otherwise removed from the gene pool, their parents are evidence of what happens when kids become "special" for a couple of generations.
"you’re a douche BTW."
"go home you miserable old jackass."
"maybe thats why he’s so crabby."
"the vast majority of parents think along similar lines as we do"
It's easy to see where the kids get it from.
I guess this really is more about some parents' and their arrogance than it is about protecting children.
Don't you think he has been there before and might have something relevant to say?
People that don't control or discipline their children, and actually act like parents, end up raising narcissistic and entitled jerks.
It is the responsibility of the parent to control their children in public and not ruin everyone else's meal/movie/flight/whatever because their precious little hot house flower wants to act up.
But see, that's the thing. They're YOUR kids. YOU are supposed to deal with it, not us.
I see a lot of every other weekend dads with their kids who barely know them. When they are out and about they usually end up just spending a lot of money on them because the courts and their moms don't let the dad have anything to do with raising them.
Check out the book "Taken into custody" by Stephen Baskerville. Subtitled "The war against fathers, marriage, and the family. It's a very well researched and well written book.
Yawn.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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!
I like to sit in the bar area in mixed clientele restaurants so I don't have to deal with kids.
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.
"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.
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?
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!
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.
I feel so...left out.
Well, at least I'm not bitching for once!
(Nelson-style HA-HA!)
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.
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.
If your kids can't go places without causing a scene, don't go out. No one forced anyone to have kids.
Don't make excuses for their behavior, deal with the monster you made.
There's a reason kids didn't bounce off the walls 50 years ago...its called discipline you might want to check into that.
The #1 parent excuse I hear all the time?
"You have to pick your battles"
WTF... no you don't. Control your brat, or your brat will manipulate you to get rewards for "behaving".
- don't mix posting time and your jet lag : it's the World Wide Web! (aka : it is now 1pm...)
- Kids ARE like the weather : you can predict it, but with a good dose of uncertainty.
(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.
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.
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.
I'd rather sit by a fun (however noisy) little kid than a grumpy old man.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He was an admittedly abusive alcoholic who also ran over a bicyclist in New York then fled the scene, running TWO red lights in the process before the cops stopped him. He now expects us to have sympathy for his recently deceased wife, when in fact he most likely made her life a living hell with his alchoholism. I truly detest the smugness of this jerk and the fact that he thinks his opinions are worth lisitening to.