[blparent] What's up with people anyway?

[Jo Elizabeth Pinto]

Sarah and I were outside yesterday--nice day, in the seventies, today it's thirty-five.  Anyway, we were over at the house of one of Sarah's friends, playing out in the front yard.  The mom had gone inside for a quick shower, which I felt good about because I was thinking it meant she trusted me enough to leave me with her daughter for a short time.  Maybe she would have gone anyway, even if I wasn't there.

So the deal is, her daughter wanted to climb up in a tree.  The branch was too high for her to reach, so she dragged a toy picnic table over and stood on it.  The branch was still too high.  The next thing she did was get a chair and put it on top of the picnic table.  She intended to climb onto the table, then onto the chair, and finally up to the tree branch, which hung out over the sidewalk.  I told her that would be dangerous and she better leave tree climbing till she was bigger or could find a tree with lower branches, or till she had someone strong enough there who could boost her up.

The words were barely out of my mouth when her mom yanks the front door open and tells me, "Well, I guess you can just leave then!"

I was shocked.  Apparently she didn't like me telling her kid what to do.  But for God's sake, if I wasn't around, I would want somebody to tell Sarah not to do something they thought would be dangerous.  I felt like saying that next time, I'd just let this woman's daughter fall on her head on the sidewalk, but I didn't figure that was a constructive thing to say, so I kept my mouth shut.

When I was growing up in this same town, any neighbor could have told me not to do something unsafe, or not to do anything at all, for that matter, and I would have listened.  It seems that the "don't tell my kid what to do" mentality has taken over, even where safety is concerned.  It worries me a little because sooner or later, and not much later at that, I'll have to be letting Sarah go out on her own a bit.  So if she decides to balance a chair on a picnic table and then try to climb up, nobody's going to say anything to her because it's against the social rules to caution other people's kids?  It's not like I yelled at the kid, or told her she had a stupid idea, or anything like that.

Sorry, rant over, I just haven't been able to get the incident out of my mind.

Jo Elizabeth

"How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong.  Because someday in life you will have been all of these."--George Washington Carver, 1864-1943, American scientist