This is the thread where we judge other people's parenting

hey I wanted to talk to Justin!

Lady on eastbound trans-Atlantic flight with three well-behaved kids who spent entire flight with eyes glued to in-flight entertainment and made no attempt whatsoever to get her children to stop watching dumb videos all night and maybe sleep for a second: I judge you, but given the triple-exhaustion-meltdown I saw brewing as you were trying to leave the plane to make your connecting flight, you will be paying for that mistake for the next few days.

that may have been my wife!

ime (with kids) there's no more price to be paid for that than for usual eastbound jet lag

Maybe after staying one place watching dumb videos for one flight, they'll be fast asleep for the entirety of the second flight.

She was speaking Hebrew, and VIE is really popular for flights to Tel Aviv -- if that's where they're headed, the second flight will be about 6 hours. So the Motion for Reconsideration of Judgement is granted. Sorry, anonymous parent!

Sunny took our 2-year-old daughter to Australia a few years ago and reported getting more stink-eyes than ever.

The 2-year-old is now five, and we're all going back down there in December - this time with her five-year-old brother.

This is a safe place, 3WU, thread title says it all, so I'm not judging your judging. But if they sit still and watch dumb videos for 15 hours, I'll take all the stink-eyes I can get.

2-year-old is seven.

not gud with math

kids were well-behaved, as I said, so I didn't give the mother the stinkeye -- but the new "improved" VIE is a confusing nightmare and not nice to make connections at any more, and based on the plane-exiting drama, I was picturing her having to drag three confused kid corpses to the next gate, which I wouldn't wanna do to myself or my kid (they looked 3, 5, and 7 to me).

corpses would be easier to drag, tbh.

nah wasn't us, it was start of June & not to Vienna. but o/w sounds familiar!

I flew ahead of the fam & behind me was a woman flying with four+ kids and they were all awake all night, left the overhead lights on too, but I dunno, it's hard to get too mad since those flights are so horrid under the best of conditions. & she had a fascinating north carolina / irish mixed accent.

Instant classic: http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-study-finds-link-between-breastfeeding-always,36823/

lol

' But if they sit still and watch dumb videos for 15 hours, I'll take all the stink-eyes I can get.

― pplains, Saturday, August 23, 2014 11:21 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink'

Fucking A

http://o.aolcdn.com/hss/storage/midas/a42773f0f710e5f67d09a9c8ec77c641/200694984/anMobaby2.jpeg

tomboy niece insists on princess dresses but wears them playing football, not fussed either way tho tbh

judging parents with kids who don't make flying a nightmare for all parties is notmimo

i kind of think spanking is bullshit

well not really even "kind of", i just think it's bullshit. outdated. shit people did in the 40s and 50s. we should be beyond that now.

Yup.

I'm not going to find it because Twitter is a rushing river so it's long gone, but a friend tweeted something about how you've also got to take a look at a society that expects children to be perfectly behaved at all times. There's a lot of pressure on parents, more pressure on some parents than on others, to keep their kids docile in public. There's also the consideration that misbehavior in black kids especially is met with harsher public/social/school consequences than that of white kids, up to and including the American police force's tendency to shoot young black men for looking dangerous and then literally getting away with murder, so when you weigh all of that, spanking a kid might seem like the least harmful path to take.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's complicated, which doesn't mean I think that hitting children is okay (I really don't, I'm sorry, I know many people were spanked as children and turned out fine, but I really truly believe that it is not okay to intentionally physically hurt children for any reason) but it does take some of the wind out of my righteously judgey sails.

https://twitter.com/iSmashFizzle/status/510548657301905408

feel like certain people believe kids are being monsters when they act out in public instead of just being kids, and those dark looks I sometimes see aimed at the parents def ante up the pressure to get kids in line. Not individual looks, I mean they really do seem to indicate an attitude of "how dare this disturb the rest of us?" It makes some parents feel like they're doing something wrong.

xp that's an interesting point in that tweet but at first i interpreted it as an argument not to spank (until i finished reading it), like spanking just reinforces the notion that you have to be well-behaved all the time, and all the pressure on parents moves them to take a physically violent action toward their kids.

also does his tweet kind of assume that spanking is more effective than other disciplinary measures?

meant carl's friends tweet, not the tweet jeff posted

My wife spanked our son before I came along. She wasn't comfortable with it, but didn't know what else to do. Now she trots me out as the "big guns", even though I've never laid a hand on him in anger ("...but I'm beginning to think that 10's not too old to start!" is what I say to him).

Anyway, yeah, I wish I could better search facebook timelines for select quotes and comments the few times that I've gotten into it with people about spanking.

Me: Studies show that children who are spanked &c.
Outspoken and Aggressive fb friend: My mom used to beat my ass and I turned out just fine!

-or-

Fb friend: But my cousin was spanked and he turned out fine - he's a POLICE OFFICER!

Lots of successful people were spanked

OJ, bin laden, margaret thatcher, bieber, etc

Friend of mine used to get forced to eat hot mustard as a kid which I thought was way weirder

Oh, hotsaucing. I met a woman once who disciplined her kid like that. I wasn't interested in getting to know her further.

I've known some people whose child discipline style made me wonder if I should have ever known them in the first place.

Yes, but hitler was spanked. And Judas was spanked for the first time just before betraying Jesus.

On an unrelated note, what is the ILX -parenting crew's opinion on walking your kid on a leash?

Depends on where you are. On a regular street? At the park? I think that would be weird. In a crowded public place where there's a risk of becoming separated, we've found one of these harnesses to be valuable.

http://www.daftdaddy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/DD-leash.jpg

Like, a shopping mall. A museum.

marcos - the friend is 100% anti-spanking. This is what she is saying, "like spanking just reinforces the notion that you have to be well-behaved all the time, and all the pressure on parents moves them to take a physically violent action toward their kids" and she's saying that it is a bad thing. Basically just pointing out that decisions on how to discipline kids are not made in a vacuum. I'm kind of speaking for her now, but she's into the positive parenting (the no discipline parenting) for her kids so I'm fairly confident that she would not argue that speaking is more effective than other disciplinary measures.

Although I think if you're goal is to keep a child quiet and still on command, spanking probably is most effective. But her, and my, response would be akin to omar's statement, that kids are kids and shouldn't have to be quiet and still out of the parents' fear that they are going to bother other people with their kidness.

lol My dad was made to eat a spoonful of black pepper by the nuns in Catholic school. I didn't realize anyone had done that since 1959.

Physical punishment in parenting is one (very bad, indefensible) thing, the fact that misbehaviour at school would get you caned across your outstretched fingers is another. Outlawed in the UK in the late '80s, I think, but very much a part of life when I was a kid. Kind of astonishing to think about now. Imagine being a British teacher in the '60s or '70s - "yeah, not looking forward to Double Geography with 3C, then there's some marking to catch up on over break - but at least I get to inflict ritualistic ABH on some of the slower kids after lunch". I managed to talk my out of the cane a few times.

Thumpings at home? Yeah, not as bad as many, I'm sure, but it did not do me any good at all.

I wasn't sure whether it was okay to judge this bc maybe there were behavioral issues I wasn't privy to but I saw a kid who must've been 6 or 7 yrs old the other day in a supermarket being pushed around in a stroller which he could barely squeeze into, feet kinda dragging on the floor, and he had a pacifier in his mouth. Maybe there was a good reason for it??

carl xp - got it, i just didn't read it well enough, my error.

You're supposed to get those pacifiers out of their mouth by the time they're one.

We waited (too long) on Henry and lost it right around when he turned 3.

So yeah, 7 would be a bit much, unless there's some other problem happening there.

http://i780.photobucket.com/albums/yy85/jmadisonbiii/tumblr_kvlx1bDrIl1qatq7bo1_500.jpg

btw, here's something i found during that enlightening google image search:

http://thingd-media-ec2.thefancy.com/default/235885787_0f7f7d7e1c01.png

I am pro-kid leash and will probably get one for Ivy when she's toddling because we live on a crazy busy street frequented by asshole drivers and I'm terrified that she'll break away from me run out into traffic. My own fear aside, leashes are cool because then the kid can walk around without having one arm yanked up over her head at all times, and give her a chance to interact with the environment a little more since she has both hands free.

xp caning across the fingers jfc. Although when I was in elementary school, the principal could paddle students unless the parents sent in a note saying that he wasn't allowed to. So fucking weird and awful.

xp I feel like a kid that big in a stroller with a paci must have some developmental issues.

wow a racist pacifier what will they think of next.

a billybobproduct, no less.

We briefly tried a leash with Beeps. She'd do this thing where she'd run and then jump like she's taking off, forcing me to raise up the leash and have her fly past the pavement within inches, like Tom Cruise in that Mission Impossible movie.

carl xp - got it, i just didn't read it well enough, my error.

― marcos, Thursday, September 18, 2014 2:54 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Equally likely that I didn't communicate it very well initially. I've been staying up way too late working lately and I've got mashed potato brains today.

xp holy shit good parenting reflexes!

We haven't got Abby's pacifier out of her mouth. It's a source of conflict between my wife and I. A doctor told us once* that it was okay to let her keep it until she was 4 or 5 and that it may help her breathing, in light of some problems she has with sleep apnea. I view it as reasonable to keep the binkie in at night like a mouthguard. My wife just lets her keep it in all day, which irritates me.

*doctors say ALL KINDS of shit, don't they?

BEEPS

Yeah, that move's awesome. I love action kids.

I'm against physical punishment for kids but singling out certain parenting behaviors (as long as they don't actually pose a serious threat to the child's safety/health) as especially taboo bothers me a lot, and it seems like there's this particular liberal taboo about physical things that I find out of proportion, considering all of the non-physical ways one can seriously harm a child emotionally. In other words, light spanking is something I'm choosing not to do, and that I would encourage others not to do, but it's also something I don't think we should get to the point of legislating against, demonizing parents for, etc. Inconsistent or arbitrary non-physical punishment is going to harm a child a lot more than occasional, controlled, fairly applied physical punishment imo. And getting on the soapbox about these easy, bright line rules is a nice way of avoiding the complexities of good parenting, which is really about a lot more than just not doing these five harmful things.

I was spanked as a kid (between the ages of I dunno, probably 4 and 8 or so?) and never really felt damaged by it or unfairly punished or whatever. My wife, on the other hand, suffered way more serious physical/psychological abuse from her mom and is horrified at the thought of inflicting any similar damage on our children so there's no spanking in our house. Fine with me, whatever. Veronica doesn't get so insanely out of hand that spanking her would do any "good" anyway so it doesn't even really occur to me as an option.

I was also spanked a few times and I find it hard to believe that they have any special significance in my overall childhood. Much worse were times when my dad merely yelled but seemed out of control angry.