[blparent] What's up with people anyway?

[Peggy]

You did the right thing!!  And don't worry, there are still a lot of parents 
out there who would watch out for your kid.  I figure if I see something I 
wouldn't let my own kid do I'm not going to let another kid do it and ... 
common sense things ... I would not let my kids stand on a chair on a picnic 
table!!



-----Original Message----- 
From: Jo Elizabeth Pinto
Sent: Wednesday, March 07, 2012 12:12 PM
To: NFBnet Blind Parents Mailing List
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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