The supermarket can be a pretty strange place if you go when it's busy. You're basically in a confined area for up to an hour, running into the same people aisle after aisle. And not only are you running into the same people, you sometimes get uncomfortably close to them, squeezing between a pair of wide-load buttocks and the ethnic canned goods shelf. It's a good place to check out the demographic of the area in which you live (for Merion, that would be Jews and upper-middle class white families).
It's also a good place to see how kids are raised to behave, especially in an environment that is not specifically designated as kid-friendly. This has become particularly interesting to me as a kindergarten teacher. I kind of like to scope out what parents have to offer me. Today, the results were not particularly encouraging.
One of the Acme customers that I kept running into was a woman and her son, who was probably around 6 years old (prime kindergarten age). For a while, they did not particularly catch my eye, but when I did happen to glance in their direction a few times, the little boy seemed pretty annoying, grabbing at his mother's hair when she was stooping to get some bread and bouncing it up and down. But that I was able to chalk up to antsy little kid stuff. (Yeah, when I was a kid, bread was boring too; I liked Trix.)
But then, a bit later, I was walking up the snack aisle when that same little kid came running towards me and carelessly knocked over a few boxes of Ritz crackers. He glanced up at me for a moment, before darting past me toward his mom who was further down the aisle. This pissed me off immediately. One of my classroom rules is about cleaning up after oneself, especially in a communal space, and this kid had obviously never been spoken to about personal responsibility. (Trust me - kids are never too young to learn about it.) So I said to him firmly, "You should put those boxes back, especially since you knocked them over."
Well, the little #!%&er completely ignored me, which wasn't completely unexpected. Upon hearing what I said to him, his mother kind of half-assedly asked him to put the boxes back (because I was still within earshot), but when I started walking away she just dropped the issue and started walking away with him! There was no reprimanding her son, no asking him to clean up the mess he made. And I'm sure there will be no whupping when they get home. That's right, young people of America - somebody else will always cover your ass; Mommy and Daddy will always be there to make sure everything is okay. That was basically the lesson the woman just taught her son in a simple minute.
And what that kid learned in a quick moment of lazy, irresponsible parenting is what will take a teacher months, or even years to undo. And if that doesn't do the job, think about what kind of person that kid will be when he enters society as an adult, or as the parent of another child. Am I being overly dramatic? Well, that is for you to judge. But I know that every person who reads this knows at least one inconsiderate jerk who is a drain on the people around him...and his mom probably never made him pick up after himself at the supermarket.
