AIBU to ask parents/carers to control toddlers in shops?

[TheOtherMrs]

Just been to do a quick shop with DH. A small child came running around a corner straight in to DHs legs. The child's mother went ballistic, screaming into DHs face about looking where he was going and threatening to hit him - she hadnt even seen what had happened!. Fortunately the child was fine and a shop assistant calmed her down, stating that DH wasn't in the wrong and that perhaps using the child seat in the trolley for the child, rather than bread, was the way forward.

It surely not too much to ask that children be properly looked after in busy shops?

My eldest was nearly 2 when I had my twins. When they were all toddling around, I used little cuddly animal backpacks with tails as reins. They were really cute and the kids loved them. The number of people who told me I was psychologically traumatizing them was hysterical. My favourite was when walking through a busy car park, a man with three little dogs on leads told me off - he couldn’t see the correlation. (My kids were pretty chill, but I would never have tolerated them zooming around like wildebeests in a supermarket where they could knock over vulnerable elderly people.)

The ones that slightly annoy me, and this only happens on Saturday mornings, is the Performative Dads in Waitrose, always with a child on a scooter or mini bicycle, swanning about, blocking the aisles. Not the child's fault of course. But they always look so smug, like look at me, I'm parenting!
Women never ever look like that with kids in a shop. They look stressed!

^This. It’s rather entitled isn’t it? But that’s what we have come to expect now.

I don’t want your kid running into me, I don’t want to have to dodge it and I don’t want to have to feel the need to beg forgiveness because you can’t control your kid running head first into my metal shopping basket or trolley and landing in a screaming heap and it’s somehow MY fucking fault.

Accidents like that only happen when toddlers are not firmly buckled into a trolley. They're predictable and completely avoidable.

I was shopping with a friend in Sainsbury’s who had her 8 year old daughter with us, we were looking for shampoo and a child of about 5/6 was screaming “MUMMMMM LOOK AT THIS? LOOK LOOK LOOK MUMMMMM”

She was in the aisle on her own and when she realised she started to shout louder. My friends daughter said to my friend “Where is her mum? why is she on her own screaming like that?”
The little girl overheard and started screaming louder and crying until her mother came walking over from another aisle. She asked why her daughter was upset and the girl pointed at us and said “they were mean to me”
The mother came over to my friend and started shouting at her saying “HOW DARE YOU UPSET MY CHILD!”
My friend pointed out she hadn’t said anything but her daughter had simply asked why the girl was unaccompanied.
The girls mother was getting more and more aggressive saying her daughter could do what she wanted and no one should be telling her otherwise. We all started to walk away and the mother and her daughter didn’t follow.

We were looking at stir fry sauces a bit later when a man came in and started shouting and swearing at my friend saying she’d “terrorised” his wife and daughter, he got so aggressive security guards had to come over. It was so embarrassing but he said similar to his wife that their daughter was free to walk around unaccompanied and scream if she wanted to. My friend said she it was her daughter who had been concerned about safety and pointed out that he was scaring her daughter!

It was so embarrassing and ridiculous that we’ve avoided that supermarket ever since.
My friends daughter refuses to go in a supermarket at all.

Some parents just don’t care but then get defensive when called out if they just let their kids run round unsupervised. It’s the same when I’ve worked in restaurants and people just eat their meals and let their kids run round getting under staffs feet or talking to other diners.
I worked in a busy Italian restaurant and every week the same family came in with 4 kids and the parents let their kids walk from table to table interrupting other diners. I had to take the kids back to the table so many times and apologise to the awkward people who didn’t want their meals interrupting by other people’s kids. In the end we had to ask them to stop coming in when their toddler refused to leave a family alone and was eating food from their plates whilst they sat awkwardly, they thought it was hilarious when we mentioned it.

Its so hard when you aren’t in a position to criticise someone’s parenting but it is frustrating when some people just aren’t concerned about watching their kids.

I read this once and it made me laugh ( & I speak as one who has a scar on ankle from scooting toddler in the supermarket - not mine )but recall taking young DS to supermarket - with in the trolley or reins ( do people still do this )

Anyway - here

Test 8: Grocery Shopping
Go to the local supermarket. Take with you the nearest thing you can find to a pre-school child -- a fully grown goat is excellent. If you intend to have more than one child, take more than one goat.
Buy your weekly groceries without letting the goat(s) out of your sight.
Pay for everything the goat eats or destroys.
Until you can easily accomplish this, do not even contemplate having children.

Absolutely.

(Love your username btw.)

You can't "control" children to the extent that they definitely won't ever run into anyone. Even fully grown adults bump each other occasionally. I wouldn't get in anyone's face though, I'd apologise and tell my child to be more careful.

This is (probably) the reason my local cafe has a “no under 16” rule.

A toddler went over the side of the escalator in my local Primark. The ambulance got to him
Before his mum did. 😰 He survived but I think he had life changing injuries.

Oh come on, that was twelve years ago and the child was six. Hardly a toddler!

@Springtimesunshinesun I thought he was about 3

A six year old in Nottingham.

The ambulance did not get there before his mother either: he was next to her when the accident happened.

I remember being a kid in supermarkets and never once eating stuff or grabbing stuff that my parents told me not to. I may have knocked some stuff off shelves very rarely, but to be fair I do that as an adult too. Always got a chocolate bar at the end though.

Supermarkets are not great places to let small kids run around, because they are full of sharp corners and hard things like shelving and racks. People moving around them are focusing on buying food, not on the three year old running round the corner flat out into a trolley that can hardly be seen.

I tend to shop late that way you can avoid most of the people and also the worst kids behaviour. If I had my way I would not allow kids in supermarkets past 20:00 - to be fair there are not normally that many around at that time anyway.

God the number of times my DS who is 2 has walked into people! It’s always the other person who apologises to me though when it was very clearly my DS who just wasn’t looking.

I try to keep him in the pram with a snack while i do my shopping but as hes getting older he's starting to fight the pram 😩

What gets me at airports is seeing tiny children/toddlers pulling little suitcases along behind them. Surprised they don’t cause more accidents.

Key words there are ‘I remember.’ And as was once very famously said, recollections may vary! If you remember it chances are it happened after you were five, certainly not before three.

People always say this but it's not my experience at all and there must be others like me.

My first memory is from 18 months and I have plenty after that well before 5. I can remember being sneaked into my Mum's old workplace to meet her friends, (at a long since demolished forensic pyschiatry unit) where she only worked for 6 months after returning from maternity leave; I can see her colleagues, the decor, where my Dad parked, the smell, how to get from the ward to the staff canteen through a staff corridor etc. I can remember lots about nursery, play groups, family weddings, big events and holidays etc. We didn't have a camcorder and my mother hated photos when I was a kid so it's not that I've "seen" this stuff some other way and attributed it to memory.

We're Asian and I didn't meet my paternal grandparents or aunties, uncles and cousins until I was 3 and we went to the country my family are originally from for a month. My memories of that time period are clear as day right down to things we ate, where shops were in the village, the layout of the houses on the dirt road they lived on. What the temples looked like. The insects I encountered. Being taught new local slang phrases. Our whole family waiting at the airport for us, crying and passing me from person to person. I'm 40 now and I've never been back there
since but I could tell you how to get to the hotcake shop or the beach on foot from grandma's house and where the creepy "black magic" lady lived and how to avoid passing her house on her way to the main town.

I always find it really weird when people say you can't remember things pre 5! I'm sure I'm not some sort of medical marvel, maybe it's uncommon but it's certainly not impossible.

One day you, or someone you love, might be elderly and/or vulnerable, @Moglet4, and I am sure you will want them or you to be able to carry on living a normal life. Why should my elderly FIL have to shut himself away from everyone, and take away the social contact that he has (and that makes life worth living) so that parents don't have to stop their children running round in a supermarket?

Are you honestly suggesting that all elderly, frail or vulnerable people should be shut away from normal life, so that children can be allowed to run riot wherever they are?

In the OP, @TheOtherMrs says the child was running round the corner - not just pottering over to collect some fruit for their mum, so that is very different to what you do with your child.

Also, as other posters have said - what about the risks to the child? Places like supermarkets are not designed to be children's playgrounds - there are lots of sharp corners, and things that, if a child knocked into them, could hurt the child. Clearly this does not apply to your gently pottering child, but the child in the OP could have run round the corner smack dab into the corner of a shopping trolley, which would have hurt!!

I'm physically disabled with leg and feet problems among other things and get sick of kids uncontrolled using shops as playgrounds. They bang into my legs, which physically hurts me, and the ''parents'' blame me for daring to be in the same room with their brats.

I've had kids knock my walking stick/crutches out of my hand and run into my Rollator.

I hate them and their me-myself-and-I attitude.

I also hate seeing kids actually sitting in the supermarket trolleys with their dirty shoes and sticky hands. GET YOUR KIDS OUT OF THE TROLLEY AND MAKE THEM WALK! It's a food trolley, not a buggy!

I do have old, frail people in my life and if a 2 year old toddling into them would cause them such serious injury then yes, I would advise they avoid supermarkets because guess what? Children are part of society too. I am not referring to screeching, scooting 6 year olds who of course shouldn’t be behaving like that in a supermarket; the lady who the vitriol was directed at also had a tottering 2 year old so the reaction towards her imo was extreme and hyperbolic. I don’t even recognise most of the behaviour described on here - if this sort of thing happened in the supermarkets around me, it would be a notable one off. Maybe I’m just lucky or maybe some of the people on these threads are just descended from Dahl’s witches!

DS used to be a nightmare in our small Tesco's - no full sized trolley to strap him into or I would have. Luckily he never ran into anyone, but a quick trip to get a few essentials would be so stressful.

And he was like that everywhere, he never stopped. Local cafe - running around. Toddler group - when the other children were sitting down singing he was doing laps of the hall.

2 year olds don’t always “toddle” they often run - very fast!

What about a buggy?