Have you ever seen a young 2-3 year old child go ballistic in a public place? I’m talking about a complete Chernobyl-quality meltdown?
I remember witnessing this once when, in lieu of Sydney’s regularly scheduled nap, we were out shopping as a family. I hope you didn’t miss that tricky bit of foreshadowing. While we circled the store like birds of prey intoxicated by the scent of cheap children’s wear, an already tired Sydney became more and more exhausted and cranky. She was systematically reaching critical mass, and she was telling us, but we were ignoring the situation because we are model parents.
Finally, her escalating protests convinced us it was time to leave. As I stood in the checkout line Sydney’s cries of frustration reached the same audible level as the store’s PA system, so I squatted down and got really close to her face, you know, in order to rationalize with her. At this point she promptly struck me in the nose. Before I could react it was our turn at the cash register so Dewdette picked her up and carried her out of the store.
Ironically, we were in the middle of reading a book called Scream Free Parenting and we had been trying to follow the advice of the author (Hal Runkel). One thing he hammers home is that we, as parents, need to keep our cool and be calm and consistent. Raising our kids is an emotional endeavor, but if we can’t get control of our emotions, what gives us the right to expect our kids to control theirs?
I walked out of the store with our loot and found Sydney absolutely hysterical and Mommy being cool, calm, collected and firm. She had deduced that trying to drag a hysterical 2 year old through a busy parking lot alone was not a safe option, so she had restrained Sydney by putting her in a make-shift timeout corner formed by the exterior of the store. I stood back and let her handle the situation. At this point we could have both managed to man-handle Sydney safely into the car, but Mommy was trying to wait her out and calm her down. In fact she kept repeating just that, “Sydney, please calm down. Calm down honey. We’re going to stay here, and you are going to stay in the corner, until you calm down.” Meanwhile Sydney was doing everything in her power to get out of that corner. She was screaming, flailing her arms, pushing herself away from the corner, and kicking her feet. Mommy was consistently keeping her restrained to the corner and repeating her words. Sticking to our guns and waiting for her to run out of gas seemed like the best option to me, too, so I stayed out of the way, but close enough to help if needed.
And that’s when we were blind-sided by the social worker.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m a social worker and I’m also a parent, so I have experience with this, and I just want you to know that technically what your wife is doing right now is considered child abuse.”
It is amazing how this woman had found the exact right combination of words to turn my brain and my tongue to complete pudding. By the grace of God alone Dewdette did not hear her.
She continued, “Now I’m not saying that as a threat, I’m not going to report this, but I just want you to know so that you and your wife can make better decisions in the future.”
Somewhere in the pudding I managed to find the words, “So now we’re not even supposed to restrain our children in public?”
“Oh I’m not saying that,” she protested, “I’m just saying that this sort of thing should be handled privately in the home. Also, you and your wife should consider taking some parenting classes. You can find more information about them on the government website.”
And then she left.
I have two regrets concerning this whole ordeal. The first is my part in creating the situation. The bible talks about making sure we don’t exasperate our children, and I think that is terrific advice. After the tears and crying and feeling like we were run over by an emotional garbage truck, we were able to stop and legitimately reflect on the situation. We realized that we had made an unwise decision to take Sydney shopping at the exact same time that her body is programmed to be sleeping. We pushed her past her limits and that is our fault.
My second regret is that I was so blitzed by this woman that I followed her advice immediately. I took over with Sydney, picked her up kicking and screaming, carried her across the parking lot, forced her into her car seat and strapped her in. She went totally ballistic trying to get out of the car seat all the way home. It was unsafe, unwise, and traumatic on the whole family. In hind sight I can think of several safer alternatives.
I’m not here to slander social workers. They perform many needed services to our community. I’m also not here to have you tell me we were right and she was wrong. This isn’t a compliment fishing expedition.
What I am here to do is help you avoid making the same mistakes I have made. In this case I know I made a few and I do not care to reproduce them. Dewdette and I made a family rule that day and as silly and shallow as it sounds on the surface, here it is.
Being good parents is more important than shopping.
Only in America, right? We’ve applied the underlying principle to our lives also. Which means we have skipped out on doing many things that would have been fun so that we can keep our girls happy. Being a parent means making sacrifices and we don’t regret that.
So what about you? Have you traded in an opportunity to be a good parent for something much less important? I’d love to hear about it.
I have one minor nit: what you attribute to “the grace of God” might better be explained by road noise from the parking lot. Just a guess.
My wife — and by association, me — have been doing the “positive discipline” thing. I suspect that a lot of these parenting techniques are near-clones of one another, but we find that sticking to the books tends to work better. Whenever we feel strangely confident that we know what we’re doing and ignore the books’ advice, we find ourselves in unknown territory and scrambling to catch up. It’s kind of an affront to one’s manhood to take parenting advice from a cheesy book series, but I’m getting used to it.
On another note, I can sympathize with the social worker’s plight… if you simply drive through a Walmart parking lot with your eyes open on any given Saturday, you’ll see at least several kids getting their butts spanked by some scary pissed-off parents. You gotta feel for those kids whose parents show such rage like that. Ouch.
I totally agree. I read a book on raising teenagers and it said, “You’re not equipped to raise a kid to be more mature than you are. You represent the ceiling of maturity for your kids. So if you want them to be mature, work on yourself.”
Man do I have work to do! Good thing I read it 12 years early!
about time for a new entry…!
hehe.
… (after reading) …
wow. roenne has yet to have a major meltdown… but this gives me chills… i’m glad to hear you handled the social worker well… it may not have been so nice if she had approached me…!
It’s so hard for me to keep my cool with my daughters, especially the oldest, because I know she not only hears but understands what I ask of her when I ask it of her even if it’s a small thing like holding my hand through a parking lot.
I wonder, are my expectations just too high? I try to put myself in her shoes when she’s going crazy to figure out if I can come up with a compromise or just calm her down. I try to remember how I acted or what I was thinking when I was four but honestly all I can remember is singing silly songs about poop.
I’m so under-equipped to be a parent!
sounds like 2 people needed an old fashioned spanking. Hey i got it and i turned out okay….. right?
(and one of those needing a spanking was the social worker)
Love!
Jeff
I feel your pain. I was attacked by a La Leche woman while feeding Lily from a bottle and not breastfeeding. You know, my child who had a heart surgery and couldn’t breast feed, becuase I had to pump all freakin’ day and add in extra calories? By the grace of God I did not KILL that lady. I still pray that she doesn’t die due to her approach to strangers.
La Leche women are indeed aggressive, militant freaks. I’m pretty sure they seek out conflict like that. Quite obnoxious.
God blessed this woman by allowing her to encounter you rather than me.
Perhaps he was blessing me. It probably would not have been one of my greater moments in terms of being His witness.
But you are right. The most important step one can take when a meltdown is eminent is to find cooling rods or run like hell.
Chris, you must be the most tolerant person I know. My own personality is too loud and confrontational to let something like this go; even though I know better. But I totally get being at a loss for words for such a situation.
My dad used to tell me some fights are worth fighting, but in the end you rarely win anything, wished I’d listened to him more.
Next time just sic Sydney on them!
In more direct response to your actual question, I think the spirit of your statement is correct. The responsibilities of parenting our children FAR outweigh shopping and other such pursuits. Its perhaps a bit unfair to parse word by word, but is a response to a blog post, so I shall parse away: my one quibble is near to end where you say “…so that we can keep our girls HAPPY” (emphasis mine). “Happy” isn’t necessarily the goal. In fact, when discipline is what is needed (to learn it, and at times to administer it), they may in fact be quite UNhappy.
The gist of your post is so right though. Being a good parent often means sacrifice.
Frau Himmler was WAY out of order, though. Her time in government service has apparently caused her to buy in the tragically wrong mindset that the government is more capable of raising and caring for a child than a set of loving parents. As a tax payer, I apologize that one of our collective staff members inserted her misguided, misinformed nose into your already difficult (if educational) afternoon.
Wow, how honest. Awesome story, Chris.
I had something similar happen to me. We were foster parents for a 9 and 11 year old from our church. The boys were black. We are not. I lived in a mixed neighborhood in Chicago. We were on a scheduled visit to visit the boy's mom. The younger boy decided on the way to the car that he was not going to visit his mom and tried to run away. This was not a safe thing, he could not get into our home without a key. So I sat down on the corner with him in my lap. He was fighting an yelling. Someone called the police and so we had to talk to the police about why I was restraining a boy. They took the boys into the police car to collaborate the story. But then they gave the younger boy a talking to. So not quite the same results.
Wow! That’s a scary story when you really think about what could have happened! It freaks me out sometimes when we’re out in public because we as parents can’t totally give in to our kids in public or we’ll create monsters, but we also don’t want them causing a scene like the one you’ve written about.
I like how you brought it around to yourself, and how you could have made a different decision that would have kept this from happening.
How many kids have you seen throwing a tantrum in the cereal aisle? I wonder how many times that could be avoided if the parent just made sure that their child had something to eat BEFORE going into the store. There are so many ways that we can mess up that we really have to pay attention and give parenting our all!