Parent-Watching

I’ve been traveling a lot the last few weeks, to New York for a day, and then England for a week, and a few days in Scotland, as well. Public transit is wonderful in most of these places, and so I spent a good deal of time parent watching. I love to watch small children. I find them fascinating. Children under age two, often under age one, before they are verbal, are already very intelligent and observing everything around them. They are learning to manipulate the world, and first and foremost is their parents.

Since I had five children myself, some far more difficult than others, I was curious to see how parents today dealt with the kinds of challenges I had to deal with. In New York, I saw one mother letting her one year old daughter play with her phone until she offered her chips, which her daughter gladly relinquished. I thought of all the times that I coaxed my children into a trade for something that they might like better than the thing I needed them not to have. Or when I bribed them (yes, that is what it was, essentially) into behaving better in public than I would have cared about in private.

On the London Eye, we ended up in capsule with a young girl called Ayla, who couldn’t have been more than two. Her older brothers were taking selfies with their father’s phone and she began to have tantrums to get the phone for herself. Literally, throwing herself on the ground in public and kicking and screaming. It was obvious to me that she was doing this purely for manipulation, and it worked. She got the phone, which she played with until she was bored because she didn’t know how to use it to take selfies and didn’t want to ask for help. I loved her antics and thought fondly of my one tantruming child who had learned to manipulate us in exactly this way.

There was the mother who was walking her ten month old, still not able to walk alone, up and down the aisle on the airplane. There was the two month old who was screaming for much of the flight (I remember this, too). There was the father with two little girls who were very well-behaved, who left them on the train from Scotland to London to go to the bathroom (something I thought was wrong but also didn’t know what else he was to do—I would have taken the girls with me to the bathroom, I suppose). There was the little boy who was playing loudly with his toys on the train to the airport.

I rarely saw parents with more than two children, however. I went to Germany with four (just after I found out I was six weeks pregnant with number five). That was an extremely difficult trip. I remember one woman asking if these children were my Kindergarten class. No, I said. They are my children. She was astonished. Both that I had so many children so close together and that I was daring enough to take them to another country for a vacation.

I’m not sure I would recommend doing this, actually. But it was what I did, in those days when I was younger and had more energy. My kids were not old enough to remember the trip, sadly. But the two I took to England and Scotland this time will certainly remember, as adults.

Parenting is hard. I tried to be good at it, and in trying to be good, probably sabotaged myself in many ways. I’m not sure you can be “good” at parenting. There really aren’t any awards or gold stars in parenting. Every child is completely different and you have to learn most of parenting all over again. Tantrums in one child may mean something completely different than in another and you have to pivot to respond. You as a parent are a child, too. That’s the way it always is.

All of you parents out there, taking your children out in public, know that even if I smile at them and think they are beautiful, I am really sympathizing with you and the impossible job that being a parent always is.