Tantrums in the Grocery Store – Part 1

by | Dec 6, 2016 | Parenting | 0 comments

Last week, we talked about the importance of teaching your children respect for their elders.  As parents, we are “elders” to our children and expect them to respect us as well.  This is never more important than when we are in public and our children’s behavior is being witnessed by “everyone in the world”.  How your children behave in public reflects directly on you as their parents.  Like it or not, right or wrong, other parents will pass judgment on your parenting skills based upon their observation of your children’s behavior.

Now that we are into our grandchildren years, we can look back and smile at all of those occasions in which we observed children going berserk in grocery and department stores. You know the 3-5 year old kids I’m talking about.

• Little Mary races around the grocery store display until she loses her balance and knocks the display over, soup cans careening across the isle.  The store employee shows up only to have the mother say “Sorry” as if it’s the store’s problem that the food is all over the floor, then turns to chase her child down another isle.

• Little Johnny thinks its cute to see how close he can swing his light saber to the dishes on display, only to find that he has grossly misjudged the distance.  Plates and glasses crash to the floor as, off in the distance, the store manager watches with a crest-fallen expression on his face.

• Little Susie decides that she doesn’t want to ride in the shopping cart where her mother placed her.  So, she begins screaming at 95 decibels and crying her little eyes out.  People nearby begin to disperse in order to get away from the ear-piercing noise while mother attempt to negotiate with the child to be quiet.  In the end, mother gives way and puts the child on the floor wherein, the child promptly stops crying and begins running up and down the store isles.

• Little Bobby takes the soda from his fast food meal and begin to play airplane with the cup.  Unfortunately, he dips the cup one too many times and the lid departs, sending soda all over the restaurant’s new carpet.  Some patrons stare at the scene while others view the restaurant manager’s angry expression and obvious mumbling under his breath.

We have all probably observed this type of early child behavior.  Assuming that the children in these examples were not suffering from a neurological or medical deficit, what would have been your impression of the parents?

When our children were young many years ago, my wife and I often asked each other why these parents would tolerate their children behaving in such an embarrassing manner. Some would try to quiet their kids but were unsuccessful.  Others carried the facial expression that showed they had resigned the battle before it ever began – their children were “calling the shots” and running the household.

Did we have that problem in our kids?  How did we solve it in less than two months with no recurrences of the behavior?  Stay tuned for Parts 2 & 3 of this blog.

Written by Brian Sheets

Related Posts

Tantrums in the Grocery Store – Part 3

Did our kids ever misbehave in public while they were in their formative years?  Yes, but it was curtailed rather quickly.  Our secret was our discovery of the musculocutaneous nerve that derives from the lateral cord of the Brachial Plexus network of nerve fibers. ...

read more

Tantrums in the Grocery Store – Part 2

Let’s examine some information on behavioral modification.  If you study psychology, you will learn of a man named Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist known primarily for his work in behavioral conditioning (Pavlov’s dogs).  His conditioning program, sometimes...

read more

Respect for Elders – Part 2

We are all familiar with the Golden Rule “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. The majority of elders are polite and generous with their time. Elders have lived enough years to realize that, while work was an important part of their lives, the true...

read more

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *