[blparent] What's up with people anyway?

[Deborah Kent Stein]

Just imagine what she might have said if you didn't stop her daughter's 
tree-climbing escapade and the child fell and got hurt!  Then it would have 
been all your fault, doubtless because you're blind and didn't know what was 
going on.  Talk about a lose/lose situation!

Debbie


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jo Elizabeth Pinto" <jopinto at msn.com>
To: "NFBnet Blind Parents Mailing List" <blparent at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2012 12:12 PM
Subject: [blparent] What's up with people anyway?


> 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
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