was at the post office and in the line was a lady with two kids that appeared to be around 3-5 years old, and naturally, in a queue at the post office, the children are bored out of their minds, one's touching absolutely everything they can find on the display shelves, playing with the cover of a stretchy fidget diary thing on the shelf idk, and the other is trying to run off to check something else out... the lady is constantly grabbing and yanking the second one back, and the child is getting distressed from that. the first one gets told off for playing with the silicone fidget on the book, "you might break it"... of course, the child continues to play with it, disobeying, and actively looking for other stuff to fiddle with, grabbing stuff on the shelves... all the while that second child is getting more and more distressed, being violently pulled back by the mother. the mother's also very distressed, having to manage these children in public all on her own, and starts getting agressive with how she's describing stuff, like "you can't have that, if we take it, they're gonna call the police and they'll take mummy away for a long time, do you want that? do you want them to take mummy away?", and it was at that point that I started to have an internal reaction, that's the kind of shit my parents would say, not just when I was little either... long story.
but anyway, both of the children, being like 4 years olds, were clearly not concerned, that vacant expression on their face, focused entirely on finding something to play with, my instincts tell me they're, well, children, and are literally incapable of reasoning for themselves at this point. Tensions increase, not to a climax, but just…. Tension. Mother is getting more and more stressed out, and I see that first kid go back to that silicone fidget, and start pulling on it real hard, then looking back at his mum, who just told him that he shouldn’t do it because he might break it. Then he pulled on it real hard again, looked back, mum’s not looking, and he keeps doing that. I’m not concerned because I’m well aware of how insanely durable silicone is, I reckon not even I could snap it if I tried. But it looks as if the child is doing this deliberately… what for, I don’t know. Maybe to upset his mum? Maybe to test what his mum claimed? It’s so confusing. I really wanted to speak up and say something like “hey there, whatcha doing? That looks fun”, cos I feel like that way I’d be able to ascertain what his goals actually are. Of course, I’m just a stranger in a post office so I didn’t say anything. But the whole situation left me rattled. These children are out of control, not that they need discipline, I honestly don’t believe in discipline. And the vibe I got was that the mother wasn’t being nice to them, and was kinda behaving the way my mum did…
What I want to know I guess is what are these behaviours, how does one adress them? Are children meant to be reasoned with? Like, if the kid was trying to break the thing, my instinct tells me to explain “Hey, I might want to have a go with it after you, and I won’t be able to if you break it. What if someone broke it before you got to play with it? Would you feel happy? Would you be sad about it? Yeah, so how about this, I’ll make sure it doesn’t get broken, so you can play with it, and then you make sure it doesn’t break so that someone else can play with it too” and let that be a friendly lesson on respecting our surroundings. These apes are new to all this and have zero clue what they’re doing or how the world works. I’m thinking they have no idea what “they’re gonna take mummy away” means at all, and what that leads to. So the severity of that threat is entirely lost on them and is reduced to plainly being a threat. Threats aren’t how you teach anyone anything not even adults.
