It started with a post on Clint Heine's blog which was linked by DPF, found its way to Stuff and now it has even made the Sydney Morning Herald. What caught really caught my attention though was this Close up poll, itself a bit of fizzy nonsense.
It is the options given to the punters, those willing to cough up 75c to have their say, that seem deficient.
You see the underlying assumption behind each of these questions is that kids are a pain. Well they can be but I actually enjoy seeing and hearing happy children and by all accounts that is what these children were, the ones that annoyed Mr Chauvel that is.
Now if I were on a plane with kids and if there was no chance of it being misinterpreted, always a risk in these paranoid times, there is a high probability I would chat with them. And I would almost certainly give them a smile.
And if the parent(s) looked fraught, well I might well catch their eye, give a grin as if to say. "I've been where you are now, know what its like - its ok by me".
But what screams at me over all of this is we seem to have completely forgotten how to enjoy children, relish them for what they are.
And that says a lot about who we are - it makes me sad.
I don't think this has much to do with intolerance of children Andrei, and a lot to do with people becoming sick and tired of noisy, undisciplined kids and their inconsiderate parents.
ReplyDeleteIn just one night at work I've seen kids playing with water from the drink dispenser, turning the waiting room into a huge mess, kids screaming and running around and disturbing some very ill people, kids stealing dressings, forceps etc from the emergency trolleys, kids fighting and wrecking wheelchairs...
All while their parents did nothing to control them.
That make it a little difficult to "relish them for what they are".
It's not necessarily curmudgeonly intolerance that leads people to complain.
It sounds like it in this case, though.
ReplyDeleteThere are people who seem to act far more rudely when faced with a child, than with an adult. For instance, once when my oldest was aged maybe two, he was helping me pick carrots. A woman came up behind us and was incredibly rude because she had to wait to pick her carrots. Had she just had to have waited for just me, her behaviour would have been very different.
Hmmm, I even have plane stories. Kids don't tend to fly well. The whole process can disrupt the sleeping patterns of very young children, so they can be unconsollabe when upset or in pain. I just remember the wailing of my youngest when we were moving countries. We'd women up really early, he was dead tired and he was crying out that he wanted to go home as the plane took off until he fell asleep several minutes later. He was only 2 and if some asshole like chauvel had said anything, I probably would have ripped his head off.
I like kids KG, I enjoy hearing them play - I used to be one you know.
ReplyDelete"All while their parents did nothing to control them."
ReplyDeleteIs the key line in the comment.
I had a plane trip between Auckland and Christchurch late last year. I was seated towards the back end of the plane where parents with babies are often placed. I was asked to move seats so that a couple could sit together and was given the option of sitting up near the front away from the noise of the baby that was crying and the clearly tired toddler and stressed parents that I could completely sympathize with. At the same time there was a young guy coming down the aisle who saw/heard what was going on, expressed his frustration and asked for earplugs - when he was told there wasn't any he threw a bit of a tanty himself.
ReplyDeleteWatching that, I asked the guy to settle down and asked to be seated next to the mum with the crying baby and across the aisle from the tired toddler. I chatted with the embarrassed mum with the crying baby, suggested that feeding the baby might help (which she did, and it did... the baby fell asleep while on the breast... I think she would have worked it out herself, but the situation had her a bit flustered) told her she had a beautiful child and pulled faces at the toddler... which worked for a little while.
Rather than moan and complain, why not help out... generally parents in that situation are stressed and embarrassed.
The fact that this has made the news though and had more than one story generated from it is downright stupid.
Frank