How Quickly We Forget
I somewhat remember being a DINK – Double Income No Kids – and getting slightly annoyed whenever a kid would act up in public, but nowadays when another kid acts up in public all I do is feel bad for the parents and say a little prayer of thanks in my head that it isn’t my kid acting up.
I think that sometimes we forget how kids can be distracting to people who don’t have to deal with them on a daily basis. I was reminded of this over and over again on the vacation I just took with my kids. We spent quite a bit of time in airports and airplanes, where the mere site of a young child worries some people because they immediately envision the potential fits that may happen during the flight.
Case in point: We had a layover in Denver on our way to California. We found our gate and I allowed the kids to look out the window while I busied myself preparing a snack for them. My son grabbed one of his toys and started banging it on the windowsill. I didn’t think much of it – other than to be grateful that he hadn’t made so much noise on the plane – but pretty soon I heard a woman say, “Excuse me!” I looked up and she was glaring at my son and actually had her fingers in her ears. It wasn’t until I saw this scene that I realized my son was disturbing everyone in the terminal and I had completely tuned it out.
I apologized profusely and for the rest of the trip I tried my best to have more consideration for all the other travelers. I guess I just sometimes forget what it’s like to not be used to loud kids and babies all the time. For the record, though, my son never tried to bang his toys while we were on the airplane. He is relatively well-behaved, after all.
Read More
Science-mom says...
Nice post, Tamsen. Yes, I guess we tend to forget that not all people around us are parents of young children. On the other hand, many people around us have forgotten that all of us were also kids once – and had given our own parents a hard time…