In any line of study, there are also false teachers. In parenting, these are other parents who insist on ways which really only work for a very specific family dynamic, or will just plain give you whack advice that is best ignored. Some will display parenting styles that will shock and amaze you, and not in a good way. Simply put, they will serve as a warning that if you engage in said parenting tactics, you might have some trouble down the road.
Like the one woman who invited a bunch of my friends and I
to her home for a playdate and stood idly by as her daughter took a dump
in the yard.
Seriously. The mom
sat and watched as her daughter took off her pants and pooped next to the
French doors that led into their home.
The child was potty-training. She told her mother that she had to go
potty, and wanted to go in the yard. The
mother beamed at the youngster's initiative, said “Sure, baby,” and the child pulled
down her bathing suit and shadoobied right there in front of me, my child, and
about three other child/parent pairs. The
mother laughed, praised her child, waved her away, and went right back to
telling us about the
underwear she got at La Perla or something.
The rest of us stood there with our mouths hanging open before
we moved to shoo our own children away from the stinky mound that her daughter
had just made.
 |
| Color me shocked. |
I was aghast. I no
longer cared about her fancy pants or was jealous that I couldn’t
afford to drop a G on underthings.
Her kid just laid an egg in the yard.
I wondered if I was being a tad conservative. Maybe I missed something. After all, I only had one child, and he was young at the
time. Was this was how everyone was
parenting nowadays? Is this a new hippie
mom thing? Are kids supposed to run
around, taking potty breaks wherever and whenever the need arises, and I’m supposed to look
on with tenderness and wonderment, never mind the reality of having to not only
scoop dog poop out of my yard, but also human waste? I wondered if allowing children to act like
animals was the new parenting trend.
Then I realized that I wasn’t uptight. This woman treated her children not as
children, but as pets. They were domesticated animals who are kept to
be amusements for their masters. Forget
table manners and please and thank you and here, let me hold that door for you. Those things are obsolete. Watch this, my kid will poop in the
yard! Isn’t it hilarious? Her expectations of what she was to be
teaching to her children were set so low that she wasn’t teaching them anything
at all.
I stepped over the pile of princess poop and left the playdate a little dazed
as I reinforced to my then-toddler that children do NOT use the backyard as a
toilet, no matter what he had seen that day.
I explained to my son that we use the bathroom, even
though he was in diapers at the time.
To be fair, this woman was only a friend of a friend of a friend; I didn't know her at all, and our
paths never again crossed. But I think
about her and her children a lot. Was
this one incident just an exception to a relatively normal upbringing that she
gave to her children as they grew? I sincerely
hope so, but what I took away from this incident so early in my parenting life
was this:
Sometimes parenting can be a minefield which leaves you
dirty, bleeding and scarred, and sometimes you will wade through waters that will leave
you breathless yet victorious, but common sense goes a long way.
And if you let your kids poop in the yard in front of
strangers, one of them may use your parenting style as a cautionary tale
on their blog. So be
careful, and do better next time.
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