Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Hands Off!

Allow me to paint a picture for you. Play area in an airport. Most everything is padded, a brother sister pair are committing felony assault on each other all over the play area, but don't appear to be threatening the safety of most innocent bystanders. Their Mom is facebooking on her phone (as I am now, but we are on the plane and VV is wrangling the wee ones for now). VV asks the children politely a few times to watch out for the much younger, Link, who is still crawling as their no holds barred cage match continues. The Mom doesn't look up, doesn't remind her kids to watch out for little ones or to stop beating on each other in general. We are collecting our kids to head to our gate and I see the boy grab his sister around the neck and prepare for a second level head twisting pile driver from the top of a small slide. I  touched his shoe to get his attention, told them both "guys, be careful, there is no pushing and kicking allowed in the play area."

The Mom jumps up with no question about what is going on and lays in to me as if a physical altercation is about to go down because I touched her son. "Sorry about that," I said "but your son appeared to be about to seriously injure your daughter."

She didn't care, ranting and raving continued. Thankfully, they quickly left the area, but not without a comment about "some strange man isn't going to touch my kids" and how I should eff off basically. I told her I would always intervene when a child's safety is in danger and that if she felt so strongly about it, she should try supervising her children. Thoughts? What would you do? How would you handle the situation?

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