Reply #125: I hear you, but you're forgetting one person in the equation

[jobycom]

The child is not an object. He or she is also a person, and has rights, and that's the person the parent is concerned with. The parent has a responsibility to the child first, to the others in the store only after that. (our responsibility to ourselves usually gets abandoned when the child learns to walk!)

And I've never said parents should always just let their child scream. I've said that sometimes that's the right solution. There's a post downthread that illustrates my point. Someone talked about their child becoming unruly for a while, and them having to let the kid scream for fifteen minutes in a store. After that, they stopped having the problem. If the parent had continued to give in to the child, taken her outside, and never taught her the lesson she needed to learn, then even more people would have had their eardrum rights violated in the future, when the child repeatedly did what had worked every time before.

Also note, we are talking about a grocery--not a movie, or a restaurant, or symphony. That would be very different, since people had paid money to attend, and their ability to get their money's worth out of it would be ruined by a screaming child. A grocery store is free to attend, anyone can leave at any point, and the only thing the screaming child is ruining is the Muzak--for which the child could rightfully claim a reward, I think.

Kids don't misbehave on cue. You go to the grocery with the child you have, not the one you sometimes wish you had (apologies to Donald Rumsfield). You can't schedule your disciplinary moments. You can't schedule much of anything else, either. :-)