I was recently in Whole Foods and the toddler kept screaming, while the negligent mother did absolutely nothing. This was not a meltdown or angry tantrum.
This article is about the screaming of a child who is too young to formulate sentences: a toddler, who relies upon ear-splitting shrieks to express delight or excitement.
The toddler I saw at Whole Foods, about a year and a half or so, had a smile on her face while she emitted sounds akin to an ambulance siren. At one point, while the negligent mother was in the checkout, and I was at nearly the opposite end of the store, the toddler let out the most high-pitched, ultra-loud, drawn-out shriek that just ripped through the air like a sledgehammer. It had shoppers stopping in their tracks.
Why didn’t this inconsiderate mother DO anything? One lost soul on Yahoo Answers says, “Screaming kids are just a fact of life in the everyday world.” I wonder what else this Yahoo Answers mother lets her kids get away with.
Why does screaming get pardons? If the mother at Whole Foods witnessed her toddler spit at another shopper or grab something out of someone else’s shopping cart, I’m sure she’d immediately jump to action and correct this behavior in a way that would be very effective against it occurring again.
Point is, I’m sure that spitting would get this mother hopping. So why let the screaming go? High-pitched, loud noise, if heard enough, can actually damage nerve cells in the ears. People go to Whole Foods because, usually, they are health-conscious. I care about my hearing health, not just my heart and bone health.
Quite frankly, the mother had a lot of awful nerve letting her toddler get away with such painful screaming; it actually hurt my ears, and I’m sure other shoppers’ as well. This mother lacks backbone. Maybe she WOULD do nothing if her toddler spit at someone, or grabbed from another person’s cart, or deliberately knocked merchandise off a shelf.
A baby who’s old enough to walk certainly knows what “No” means. When parents say, “She’s just a baby,” this is code for: “I’m too spineless to teach my kids how to behave in public.”
For those of you who use your child’s young age as an excuse for offensive public behavior, does this mean you do absolutely nothing when your baby starts touching the stove or electrical socket? Or picks up a steak knife? I’m sure you’d jump to action and correct this behavior.
So why be so feeble when it comes to the screaming? A one-and-a-half-year-old can be trained NOT TO SCREAM in public. And for all the naive parents who say to the anti-scream crowd, “Oh, just you wait till you have kids; you’ll change the way you think!” consider the following:
There are plenty of parents who 1) have taught their kids not to scream in stores, and 2) are just as disgusted with the parents who do permit screaming as they were before they had their first child.
I love this posting on Yahoo Answers: I want to yell at the parents for not controlling their child. They just let their child scream louder and louder in the store and nothing gets done. Store management needs to step in, but for some reason they are scared to. Just like parents are scared to discipline their kids.
Sources:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080130220901AAhM9kD
http://www.gcaudio.com/resources/howtos/loudness.html