Stupid Sh*t Parents Do With Their Children

Everyone has their general complaints about certain places parents take their young children. Restaurants, movies, and other places where adults enjoy peace and quiet of their surroundings, children are not welcomed by most. What about the other side of that? What about safety, or general consideration for the kids? I've seen a few things in the last few months that make me question the sanity of many parents – not all. I know a lot of you are intelligent, normal human beings who also happen to have children.

Dog Parks:

Does anyone know the definition of an off-leash dog park? I do. It's an open area where dogs of all sizes are free to roam, run, jump, and play without the restrictions of a leash. Apparently there are some people out there that think their 5-year-old should also be allowed to roam free in the dog park. Even highly supervised this isn't a safe idea. Parents tend to become outrageously angry if their child is accidentally bowled over by a 60 lb excited boxer puppy. Not that it's ever happened to me.

Wait, I lied. It's never not happened to us: me and my beautiful baby girl (Isley) at the dog park. She's leaned on kids, kissed them until they simply fall over, jumped up (which is a bad habit, and she's training out of it, but she was under a year old when this was happening), run into them, and otherwise knocked down small children. As someone with a dog, it feels very strange to be unwelcome in, you know, a dog park because of someone's small children.

Isley, the sweetest dog in the world, is shouted at at nearly every dog park she's ever been to. She doesn't understand what she did to be screamed at, and really – she hasn't ever done anything wrong in the first place. She loves children. She loves to lick them, play with them, and sometimes gets overzealous in her excitement and knocks them down. She's never done so maliciously, and never bitten or scratched anyone before. If you yell at her, she'll give you this face:

She makes that face at me every time she wants to go to the dog park but can't, because you brought your kids there.

For the record, almost every dog park in the city has a children's playground within a hundred feet or so. Let the kids play on the swings and watch the cute puppies from the other side of the fence, where they're less likely to be accidentally injured. Parents can still watch their children and dogs at the same time, while keeping both parties in the safety of their own areas. If this is too much, and you can't watch your child play on the playground and your dog play in the dog park, maybe you need to find another activity that both your dog and child can enjoy without jeopardizing anyone's safety.

Haunted Houses

More recently I've seen the uncanny occasion where parents take their very small children to haunted houses designed to scare, startle, and disgust adults. When I was 6 or so, my mother took me to a haunted house that had a special “lights-on” children's hour. I was scared out of my wits, crying and screaming (until we saw Frankenstein, who gave me a high-five), and I was not necessarily a sissy-kid.

This month, I've seen many, many children clearly too-young to even watch scary movies, dragged crying and screaming through a haunted house that has been labeled one of the scariest in the united states. I understand you want to go through a phenomenal haunted house to have fun or whatever your particular kink is for this sort of thing, but hire a babysitter, you ass. Very few haunted houses have a “Children's hour” anymore, and those that do generally don't have all of the scary stuff there or working at the time (there is one, a corn field, that turns off all of its props to let people walk through the maze during daylight. That's the only one I'm aware of).

Whenever this sort of thing happens, I hope the actors/props are triggered by the parents, not the sobbing child being dragged or carried through the pitch-dark-strobe-lighted-monster-filled house. Actors, make an effort to make that kids mom pee, or make daddy cry. There is no real reason to bring a small child through a dark, potentially dangerous situation.

“Mommy, why is daddy crying?”
“Because that man wants to take daddy's face away from him.”

Is how it should be. Not:

“You almost made me drop my kid!”

Or,

“He's almost 2 years old, he can handle it."

That being said, teenagers are perfect for that sort of thing, and should be dragged through willingly or not – it'll make everyone feel better.