I should shop at 11 p.m. to avoid kids

I don’t have kids, so this may be me stepping out of line… but then again I was a kid and had real parents so maybe it’s not.

I was grocery shopping on a Tuesday afternoon and it was surprisingly full of kids and parents. While pushing my shopping cart with a lame wheel down the aisle (I always get the messed up cart), a little boy about 6 jumped into the middle of the aisle, put his palm out and yell “STOP!” at me. His mother continued down the aisle and ignored him. Really? Your kid is yelling at another shopper and you’re ignoring him?

In another aisle, a young mom had a 2-year-old in the seat of her cart and the child was putting everything she saw in the the cart. And the mom ignored her. Now I’m curious about how much extra she paid at the register….

Then there was a page for “Christina” over the loud speaker, they were paging her to come get her child in another department. They paged twice. If I were missing a child, they wouldn’t have to page twice! I’d like to think that I wouldn’t allow a child to go wandering off on their own either.

These things all happened in the course of one shopping trip. Add this to the daily occurrences of the neighbor’s children staring at my husband and I every time we set foot outside, and you can see why I’m sick and tired of other peoples’ kids.

Ignoring your child’s bad behavior isn’t going to make them bored with misbehaving, it tells them that you don’t care if they misbehave and the make the rest of the world annoyed… at you. When my siblings and I were growing up, my mom could take all three of us to the grocery store and none of us would consider yelling at other shoppers, wandering off, climbing shelves or putting extra stuff in the cart because our parents taught us better than that.

We had jobs, someone got to hold the shopping list and we participated in the shopping trip by adding up the cost of the groceries or calculating discounts (see mom involved a math lesson). When we were older we even helped mom push the cart.

When I see a store employee stop a child and say, “where’s your adult?” I want to hug them (I don’t though because I’m sure that’s creepy).

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