Stamp out literacy!

Once, at a bookstore where I was clerking, I heard a mother snap at her kid, "No, you can't have a book! I'll buy you a toy later!"

I'm no nutritionist, but...

Let me preface this by saying that I don't think there's anything wrong with a kid having the occasional French fry. This isn't about that.

It just made me laugh when I heard a parent at the other table say anxiously to her daughter, "Eat your fries, honey! You haven't had any vegetables all day!"

Hey, it's never too early to teach your kids about the joy of sexism!

Overheard at a toy store, sternly spoken by a grandpa-looking guy to a little boy -- two years old at best -- holding a pink crayon box with ponies on it: "For God's sake, no, I won't get you that. Put that down right now. That's for little girls. You're not a little girl, are you?"

Perhaps the boy would have better understood why he had to drop the offending box immediately if Grandpa had told him a little more about the dangers of cooties?

Let's try to keep it the happiest place, shall we?

At Disneyland, I was watching the paddle wheeler sail by, and I saw a mother on the top deck with a baby in one of those baby carriers that straps to your front. She was leaning over the rail to look down at the water, and was bending far enough over that her baby's head was actually pointed down. The captain of the boat was looking down at the bridge and yelling at her to stop leaning over the rail. I assume he was having the same horrific imagined image I was -- of that baby sliding out of the carrier and falling two stories into the Rivers of America. Everything turned out okay, but I don't think the woman ever did realize how reckless she was being.

Sometimes the wrong animals are in the cages...

We were at the zoo a couple of weeks ago, and an older brother (maybe 3 or 4) hit a younger brother (maybe 2), which prompted their mother to grab the older brother, yell at him, "No, hitting is BAD!", and then -- wait for it -- hit him as punishment, while simultaneously declaring yet again, "Hitting is BAD!" Talk about a confusing lesson!

You can dress him up, but you can't take him out

I was at the park with my son — he was just a baby then, less than a year old, I guess — and I saw another new mother with her baby. The little one was barely old enough to crawl and was dressed in one of those long, neck-to-toe gowns. It was spotless white.

The mom put the baby down in the sand to play and then opened up her book. The baby, quite naturally, started scooching around looking for something to do.

After a minute or two, the mother looked up and saw what her baby was up to. By now the gown was pretty dirty, and of course bunched up past the baby’s diaper.

The mom started yelling at the baby. “Look at you! You’re a mess! How could you — oh, that’s it, we’re going home!”

This baby couldn’t have been more than seven or eight months old. I don’t know what amazed me more — that she brought him to a sand-intensive park in a white gown and expected him to stay clean, or that she really seemed to think he’d understand when she told him he’d done something “wrong.”

My son, the hummingbird

We were buying lunch at the aquarium in Long Beach.  As we waited for our order, I heard the mother ahead of me say to her kid, "No, you can’t have any more soda.  You’ve had too much sugar today.  They have Hawaiian Punch — you can have that instead.”  (They also had milk and juice, and of course water, but I guess that would have been too little sugar and might have thrown her kid into withdrawals.)