by Amber Rhea
this one, written by kate harding who is no lie one of my very favoritest internet people! i think i cried when i found her site! but ouch, this paragraph:If I can see that the adult is trying to get the outburst in hand, and the kid is simply having none of it, I chide myself for my own knee-jerk uncharitable thoughts and try to focus instead on how frustrated that parent must be, what a crappy position she finds herself in. I believe this is The Decent Thing to Do. But at the same time, there really are parents out there who do nothing, or almost nothing, when their kids start making life miserable for everyone else on a plane or in a restaurant or in a store — and I reserve the right to smugly judge them, dammit.
i just… don’t think anyone should reserve the right to be smug, ever. can i say that? can i say that i think smugness is inherently assholish? smugness involves a closing off of your mind to alternate possibilities. also, i just don’t see the point of it. it’s self-serving at the expense of others and even if it IS justified, just… why expend mental energy on that, instead of something more positive? like you could smugly judge your fellow airplane passengers, i guess, or you could wonder about how many of them are going and how many are returning (does anyone else like to do this on airplanes?) and whether any of them are getting married, or if any of them are leaving home planning to begin a new life and if they’re sad about this or happy or a bit of both. airplanes are so great for speculating about people because you know, if nothing else, they are traveling a great distance, for usually no small cost, so they’ve got to have some kind of reason.
and you may say, “well isabel, i am not interested, personally, in making up backstories to people i don’t know” to which i say, “well great, bring a book then.” but see, when you are smugly judging the Bad Parents who Should Be Minding Their Kids, Dammit, you are already doing that! it’s like david foster wallace speech i’m completely obsessed with and reread like once a month and link all the time because it should be required reading for life, when he says, “it’s really easy to view people in terms of how irritating they are to you right now, but for all you know they are super wonderful people who have committed minor acts of heroism, and maybe it’s not the most likely thing but it sure is possible and it is to your own benefit to try and entertain that possibility when you can.”
look, i’m not going to say there are no bad parents. THERE ARE. one of mine is. i am just going to say that you absolutely cannot fucking tell from observing a parent with their children for very long whether or not they are good parents. FOR EXAMPLE: my brother and i were really shockingly well-behaved kids, by and large. if you were to see us hanging out in public with my father, you might have assumed that he was a very good father because, look how well-behaved his kids are! you would NOT have seen, in watching me and my brother entertain ourselves peacefully in our father’s company, the fact that my father is an actual sociopath incapable of loving anyone, including his children, who did a number of things to make our lives hugely stressful while we were growing up!
on the contrary, if you had seen us with our mother in the grocery store - because my mother was the actual parent in this relationship, which meant she had to take us to the grocery store sometimes, unlike my father who never needed to because we only saw him on weekends - you may have caught us in one of our whinier moods. you may have seen us fighting at each other, tattling on each other, yelling about how we wanted to go home. and you may have thought to yourself, “shit, that woman really needs to get her children under control for my personal benefit.” you would NOT have seen the fact that she was still several years from finding a treatment that would consistently alleviate the pain of her fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. you would NOT have seen that she was freaking out about how she was going to feed us on a grad student’s wages because my father wasn’t paying child support. you would NOT have seen the fact that we were ordinarily very well-behaved but the past few months had frayed all three of our nerves.
so this is why you should never judge - smugly or otherwise - parents based on a single glimpse of them in public. because you don’t fucking know what they’re dealing with, what they’re normally like, what it was that may have been that last straw today. you don’t know if the kids are quiet because they know if they misbehave they’ll get beaten till they bleed later [this is not me, for the record, this is a hypothetical but probably very real situation]. you don’t know - and Kate addresses this in her piece and then just… ignores it, which is weird - whether the kid does in fact have special needs, whether they are autistic and can’t deal with crowds but can deal less with being separated from their parents because their parents don’t have the money for a steady caretaking assistant. you just don’t know.
so shut the fuck up and read your book. it’s better for your soul than judgment.
I think that’s what bothers me the most about this sort of thing. In general, I try very hard not to be judgmental, and I had to giggle a bit when you were describing backstories for these people because I do that all the time. And when something is annoying me, I turn up the volume of my music or start reading my book or whatever distraction I need. I mean really, this is only a few hours of your life so why the hell are you wasting it worrying about what somebody else is doing? And if it’s bringing you some small amount of discomfort, just get the hell over it and move on.
It boggles my mind whenever I read people on the internet saying they have a PROBLEM with this. Really? I wonder if some people just like to sound more tolerant than thou. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be around screaming kids. Parents need to get their kids in order. Consistent parenting works; letting your kids run the show does not. And I absolutely DO reserve the right to be smug.
Oh and what I REALLY hate is when people suggest that I just feel this way because I don’t have children, and therefore I have no right to an opinion and should just shut up. First of all, I know plenty of people who DO have children and who share my opinion - for example, my mom. Secondly, do they think I’ll magically LIKE screaming, rude children once I have some of my own (because obviously THEY’LL be screaming and rude too, it’s just inherent, right, nothing to do w/ parenting styles…)? Third, yes in fact, I DO plan to have a child in the next few years, so check back in with me then and see if I feel any different. We can take bets if you want.
