A policeman in the supermarket ,would you do this?

[girlfriend44]

This morning there was a policeman doing some shopping in the supermarket.

A family walked past and when the dad noticed the policeman in the aisle he said to his little girl.
Look there's a policeman. If your naughty round the supermarket he will take you away to prison. The little girl. Just listened and didn't say anything .
He made sure she saw the policeman and as said told her he would take her to prison if she was naughty.
The policeman never heard but I did . I was right by them
Would you do this?
AIBU to think it's a bit odd.

By threatening her with the police? To make her eat her "veggies"? Jesus. Also a toddler is a "diva"? I take it you don't have children?

Veggies!

So what's the alternative - you teach your child to be suspicious and terrified of everyone? And when they get lost or something else happens, they don't even know where to start looking for help? 99.99% of police officers are decent people.

How do you know the "kid" wasn't fazed?

It’s a throwback to the days when children were raised to live in fear of adults. I suspect the DF was raised the same way and is a bit hard of thinking. When I were’t lass loads of parents used to say this.

No just teach them to despise the police then Far better obviously

I can remember my mum saying that to me
I’m not getting the drama

No the father was scaring the child because he's a shite parent.

My mother NEVER said that to me and my Dad was one of the people these parents are teaching their children to be afraid of.

Maybe the police en masse should do more to earn the trust of the public then. I don't trust police on an individual or systemic level and I'll be making sure my children, especially my daughter, know that they are not to be blindly trusted.

When we were young and mis-behaving, parents would pack us in car and drive us to prison a few suburbs away. Pull up, and tell us we were going in. If it was really heavy duty, someone would get out, talk to prison guard outside and they would come over and ‘have a chat’ about being naughty. Once, when one of us had been REALLY naughty, they got them out of the car and started to frog march them towards the entry. It taught us good lessons and made us behave and built character. Would never happen today as parents are snowflakes let alone kids who are even more brittle.

Can confirm I was told this as a child in the early 2000s and it hasn’t affected me in the slightest 🙄

Would you have told her that when she was a toddler?

Yes, it is. Parents should discipline their own kids. The supermarket employees won't be cross with her either, as, again, disciplining her is the parents' job.

That's child abuse. I'm sorry that happened to you.

Not good at all. I would not do this. Our parents did this in the past, though. Most of them.

I thought that taking people who do bad things away and locking them up is part of how the police protect us. In fact I swear I've read thousands of comments saying that the trouble these days is that lots of little shits kids don't fear the police enough. Personally I'm happy for kids to grow up with the idea that if you do bad stuff the police will cart you off. Obviously you need to be careful to also give the flipside - that if you are not doing bad stuff then the police are there to help you. People are assuming that this overheard aside in a supermarket was the sum total of what this gentleman has ever said to the child about the police, based on nothing whatsoever. But if an assumption has to be made to have a pop at somebody's parenting, particularly if it's a man, then by God MN will make that assumption.

She is a toddler and I already instill it by, for example, not engaging with the police at an emergency services day where kids were able to meet fire fighters and paramedics and get in their vehicles. Same with my son.

In the days when the scrap merchants used to drive around not quite 'any old iron' but that sort of thing, I remember seeing a naughty litle boy burst into tears because an older man had told him if he carried on being naughty the scrap man would take him away.

It's the sort of 'bogeyman' stories that have been used to encourage children to behave for years. The threat of a higher authority. Not a big deal.

I've had parents tell their kids that I'm going to throw them out of the shop where I work if they don't behave before and it does annoy me a bit. It's a lie, I'm not going to throw them out. What am I meant to do if they carry on misbehaving? It's the parents responsibility to take them out, not mine!

This!
Policeman's daughter here.
Both my parents used to hate hearing children being told this.
As the quoted PP says, they shouldn't be taught to fear the Police, they should be seen as safe adults

I think the point is the police are to be feared if you're doing something you shouldn't be doing (in the grown up world something illegal), not if you need help.

Unfortunately it’s not odd but it IS bad parenting.

I used to enjoy waving at the policeman and firemen as a kid. I quite like waving to firemen now .............😁

This isn't building character or good lessons. It's teaching a child to conform through threat and lying. It's actually a very poor way to teach a child how to behave.