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Okay, maybe I’m being a little picky here but on what planet is it okay to let your child loose at a free kids’ event, chat away with another Mommy gripping your Starbuck’s for dear life while ignoring your child’s bad behavior with other kids? Uh, not on my planet. Princess Tater Tot and I went to one such event this week where the main activity was building your own train track with all the cool configurations the local toy store had. They dumped buckets full of tracks onto a carpet in the middle of the floor and let ‘em have at it. In theory, I guess this could work except that kids are kids. There were three parents in the middle with the kids, yours truly among them, and about 25 kids. Needless to say there were multiple meltdowns and more than one parent frantically negotiating with a kid they had never met before to keep two kids from coming to 2-5 year old blows.

All in all it went pretty well, considering. But one child in particular was so clearly sans parent that it really began to bug me. That was probably due to the fact that he almost took Tater Tot’s hand off trying to snatch a bridge away from her on which she was happily rolling her borrowed Thomas. “That’s my bridge!” he shrieks. “Oh, is it okay if she plays with her train on it? I see you built a really great track here. Can you share it?” I begin negotiations with. “NO! I BUILT THIS TRACK!” Okay, I guess that would be a the end of negotiations. I understand that kids are kids and most of them don’t naturally want to share but this would have been the point at which I, as a parent, would have stepped in and said kindly that he needed to share or tried some other negotiating tactic that allowed him to keep his dignity and pride at having built such an awesome track but did not frighten the young children around him. At another point soon afterward, he snatched a train out of Tater Tot’s hand. That’s where I got more firm and stated in no uncertain terms that you do not take toys from other girls and boys. You ask first. I took the train back from him and gave it back to Tater Tot even though she had easily moved onto something else. So instead he tried to snatch yet another train from some other kid even though he already had one train. Luckily another adult stepped in and handled that one with equal firmness. Where is this kid’s parent again?

I don’t think there are any bad kids. I really don’t. And I don’t think that the parents of misbehaving kids are necessarily bad parents. Kids misbehave. They are learning how to behave with other people. That’s part of their job. But it is the job of the parents to teach them good behavior and this kid’s parent was just falling down on the job. Nobody even looked interested in what this kid was doing. I just can’t imagine…

Okay, I’ll get off my soap box now.