But can parents be PARENTS?

Our local YMCA has a lovely hot tub. Unfortunately is located right next to the swimming pool. While this might be considered convenient by most, I find it somewhat inconvenient on Saturday mornings when I want to relax in the hot tub while a score of children are not absorbing their swimming lessons.

Yesterday, as I started to unwind in the hot tub, two little girls (around five years old) began shrieking in their highest pitched loudest voices. This went on for nearly a full minute before the life guard spoke to them. This quieted them somewhat for a few minutes. However, in short order they were back at it on and off for the next five minutes. I got fed up and gave up, since the most enjoyable part of my YMCA experience was being ruined.

Do I blame the five year old girls? Nope. What I want to know is why wasn't the instructor attempting to quiet the girls? Why did the pool life guard have to intercede on behalf of the rest of us trying to enjoy the pool area? Also, here's the MUCH BIGGER QUESTION: Why didn't the mother, or mothers, of these girls get off their lazy butts ten feet away and exercise some parental control on their offspring? The benches on the pool deck were full of prim and propper looking moms gazing adoringly at their little cherubs in the water. Yet none of these suburban nitwits saw a problem with the girls' behavior.

I can't tell you the number of retail stores I have been in where elementary school children have been allowed, by their laissez-faire parents, to treat the establishment as their personal playground as the run full tilt up and down aisles yelling at the top of their lungs. If the parent manages to register that their child is behaving inappropriately, they ineffectually address the child with such statements as "Johnny, stop that." or "We don't run inside."

I have often witnessed such behavior completely out of site of a parent. Imagine, elementary-aged children unattended in a public place. (Do the parents have a secret wish that their children are snatched away?) I have blocked the path of a child or two running through a store and severly addressed them and informed them that the store is not a playground.

One child do slow his pace and walked away from me. I encountered him running two aisles later. So, I stuck my arm out and let him run into it, virtually clotheslining him. (Yes, I know I am evil.) I then had him take me to his mother. The woman had two other children in one of those child-friendly carts that combine with a pretend car. The two she had with her were also quite boisterous, which she had trained herself to ignore. I guess if you can't train your children you train yourself to ignore their foibles. I told her about my two encounters with her son, minus the clotheslining aspect of the second. She tiredly looked at me and appologized for his behavior. She then told him he needed to keep a hand on the cart at all times for the rest of their time in the store. Needless to say, I did see him later bouncing around without one hand on the cart, as the mother tuned him and the other two, again.

Some of the more liberal minded folks out there may be inclined to dismiss this scenario as "kids will be kids". That really doesn't work for me. Society needs for parents to be parents. Children need to be taught from a very early age about acceptable behavior. If parents do not correct their children's behavior at age five (or six, or seven, or eight) they're going to find it very difficult to break their children of bad behaviors later on.

I am inclined to believe that parents who are not correcting their child's behavior at five, probably won't be doing much about their child's behavior at twelve or fifteen. It is no wonder that I keep encountered more and more self-centered overindulged young people with a garish sense of entitlement. All the local high schools student parking lots are full with predominantly late-model cars. Those cars are driven with the music so loud and bass-cranked that you can hear the music six cars back from them at a stop light.

I could go on and on about the trickle down effect of poor parenting and its overall effect on society. But it does seem rather pointless. As my friend, ChangeJunkie recently pointed out on her blog, manners seem to have gone the way of the carrier pigeon. Why should people be concerned about how their child's behavior effects society when they don't really care about the impact of their own behavior.

Every time I get irritated with the phenomenon of Other People's Kids, I thank whatever Powers there are that our son has never been the cause of irritation to others (at least not that I know of). My husband and I made sure that our son knew from a very early age what was acceptable behavior and what was not. "Time out" worked when he was a preschooler. Loss of priveleges or, in the rarer more extreme cases, a solid reaming out worked as he got older.

I'm not saying that we're the best parents in the world. Some friends and family feel that we're a little too tough on our son. However, we take our parenting responsibilities very seriously. And, to all accounts that have ever reached our ears, our son has always been one of the most well liked and well behaved kids of his age group.

One thing that usually drops my annoyance level with other kids public behavior is if I am with my son. He and I usually make eye contact when some kid is screaming or running in public. He usually sighs and rolls his eyes in annoyance. He helps me feel vindicated in my own annoyance with the misbehaving child.

Children are not all predisposed to acting like "drunken monkeys" or "midgets on acid" (quoting Denis Leary). Kids can be kids without running over their parents and societal expectations. Parents just need to be PARENTS!