Standing in line at Great Wolf Lodge, I started talking to two lovely girls – a 12 year old and her 11 year old sister. They told me that they were the oldest of 9 children and their three year old sister recently died, so the family visited Great Wolf Lodge for a much needed pick me up.
Being a mom of a three year old myself, I couldn’t help but ask why she died. Meningitis. The idea of any of my children dying suddenly terrified me so that I googled meningitis and learned that if caught early, it is easily treatable with antibiotics.
Hmmmm…. Could it be that with nine kids, the parents didn’t notice the early symptoms? Could they be so relaxed by the time they got to the eighth kid that they didn’t get too concerned about a fever or sore neck? I do not know nor will I ever know. They could have done everything right and the little girl still could have died.
What I do know is that my thought process of hypothetically blaming and judging the other parents, whom I had never even met, was really my own futile attempt to rationalize that such a terrible fate could never happen to me. That if the other parents had only been more attentive or taken their child to the doctor earlier, her death could have been avoided. And with that, if I am attentive and respond quickly to symptoms, this will never happen to me.
This is a very human response that allows us to survive stressful situations. In fact, Thomas Freedman writes about in From Beruit to Jerusalem. He noted that people were able to stay sane in the midst of falling bombs and daily death in worn torn Beruit by rationalizing that if people had only walked on the other side of the street or stayed out of the crowded market at a certain time of day, they would have survived.
I experienced the same phenomena myself in New York after September 11, when we all thought the next terrorist attack was just around the corner. I had a whole system worked out where I would work from home until 9:30 a.m., then take the subway in to the office because if terrorists were going to bomb the subway, they would do it during rush hour, not at 9:30. I adopted other various quirks that helped me feel safe in a situation where I had very little control.
Sound familiar? As much as we would like to think we can control our children’s health and safety, some things are totally out of our control. That is really scary. So what do we do? We keep ourselves sane by making up our own rules about the right way to parent. When others break those rules, we have a strong reaction. Why? These rules make us feel safe and it can feel really uncomfortable to challenge them. It’s much easier to judge.
What do you think? Have you ever judged another parent based on limited information? Why?
One Comment
The answer depends on where you are or whom your children may be bothering. If you are in the mall and your children are running around the fountain, I’d say let them go. If perchance they are running into people or people are having to swerve to avoid them in the mall, I’d say stop them. Like it or not, we are subject to societies social mores, and the earlier we teach our children that, the better they will be in the long run. When in public, we should teach our children that others wish to enjoy the space they are occupying too, and we all need to compromise to allow that to happen. Our children already think they are the center of the universe! Let’s remind them of the other planets as well.