About unruly teens and that mum at theatre

I really think the stewards should do a better job of policing this kind of behaviour and asking audience members to be quiet or leave. It's not fair to expect other members of the audience to marshal each other like this; it basically puts you in an impossible situation.

Yanbu If people aren't going to teach their children how to behave appropriately others will

Me too! I keep my blood pressure down a lot of the time by realising I am old and won't have to deal with it for donkeys years

Wouldn’t have touched but where were the theatre staff? They should have intervened if they were as lairy as you have made out.

Err... I wasn't talking to you.

I was replying to a specific post by someone else.

Yep. I was taken out of school at 13, sister at 12 and brother at 9! We're all successful, I'm now a lawyer (went back to uni), sibs are tattooists. My dad always said we didn't need school education as we'd find a way to succeed and we have!

This is really the last form of prejudice that seems acceptable.

Yes indeed what hope of raising productive citizens when they can be excluded from education so easily.

I was excluded from school because the teacher tried to force me to sit for a lesson about sex that my belief system did not allow me to sit through.
I was excluded from school for hitting a child who was bullying my younger sibling.

These to me are examples of being successful. Education is not.

What hope of raising law abiding, productive and valuable citizens with a bar set so low.

I put the rate of exclusions etc down to a racist education system that is set up to completely alienate and discriminate against gypsy children.

I was excluded from school because the teacher tried to force me to sit for a lesson about sex that my belief system did not allow me to sit through.
I was excluded from school for hitting a child who was bullying my younger sibling.

These to me are examples of being successful. Education is not.

@LakeTiticaca Gentle parenting still has consequences, you’re confusing it with zero parenting. I’m glad we don’t still live in a time when it’s ok to threaten children with violence

I think you're mixing me up with someone else. I said no such thing.

If anyone is wondering why children behave so badly nowadays,, here is your answer. If I, and probably most of my generation, had behaved like that in public it would have resulted in being frog marched out by the scruff of my neck and possibly a thick ear to accompany it.
None of this "gentle parenting" bollocking. You did as you were told or else

Therein is the problem, people are violent.

I think you did the right thing. I recently went to the theatre and sat behind a school/college trip and the kids talked and laughed genuinely the whole way through. I gave them a very stern shushing (did nothing) and would’ve tapped them if I needed to. In the end we changed seats in the interval because we couldn’t stand it and we would’ve spoken to the teacher but they were not sitting near the group. I just can’t imagine that you could hit him hard enough, while leaning over a seat, with presumably one finger for it to cause any pain. The mother sounds dramatic and ridiculous

But you did say yourself that a tap on the shoulder warrants a punch, then cry racism when people worry about yo?

Goodness my (now ex)friend is the sort of mother who would’ve been thoroughly upset about you chastising her unruly son in a theatre. I know so many of them in fact. I don’t actually get why so many people these days consider themselves parents when they don’t actually do parenting!!

YANBU OP.

Racism. Assumptions. I used to get followed around shops because people assumed I was going to steal something.
Despite being the most placid, people pleasing kid.

Would you be posting all of this about any other minority group?

We had this at the theatre with a really unruly school group (play was a gcse text) many school groups there but this one were just awful.

We and many around us were so fed up with them talking throughout - we all spoke to the theatre manager at the interval and they had a word with the teachers. This included teachers from a different school who couldn’t believe how badly these kids were behaving and how they were not being challenged by their adults to stop.

Something obviously was said as the 2nd act they were a lot better

it’s so sad that they weren’t prepped and supervised as to how to behave in a theatre before they went as it was really disruptive and did spoil the 1st act so much.

In my opinion you were absolutely right to be annoyed and ask them to be quiet, but wrong to attract his attention in that way.

If the objective of the shoulder tap was to get them to be quiet it was almost certainly going to exacerbate the problem. I’m not suggesting you did anything wrong either legally or morally but when people are confronted like that they generally get defensive especially when in a group as they won’t want to lose face. Asking super nicely is usually more effective ‘would you mind if …’

I am not suggesting the OP is guilty of this but sometimes people do confront with the hope that people will respond argumentatively or aggressively so they can adopt an aggrieved stance.

As for the poster proud of stealing sweets, seriously

First of all I resent the fact that gypsies and Irish travellers are always lumped together in articles like this when we are completely different ethnicities.

Secondly, we don't value education. So what? Plenty of other ways to be successful in life. In fact, how do you define success?

Oh so if a little old lady came up and tapped you on the shoulder to ask you something you'd punch her in the face?

You aren't punching anyone in the face, stop talking nonsense.

You weren’t in the wrong - however, I would never touch another person, especially a child, in that situation as it can always be misinterpreted and physical contact of any sort is generally forbidden these days. Eg teachers are not allowed in many schools to touch children to apply sunscreen.

Going forward, I’d still intervene but a loud ‘excuse me’ or tapping the arm of the chair would suffice.