One for all parents everywhere

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That's my daughter

She's had an eventful summer and autumn: Moving from Japan to Canada, turning 8 years old, mastering the two-wheeler, learning to do more than dogpaddle, starting at a new school and now she's become an award-winning artist.

Excuse me, I think I have something in my eye....

What war does

This story is beyond the mere garden variety child abuse nightmare tale. This is something that would not have happened the way it did if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their gang of bloodthirsty ideologues had not decided to invade Iraq. This soldier pretty obviously has PTSD and will probably never be the same. And neither will the four-year-old daughter he waterboarded because she wouldn't say her ABCs.
And sorry to Gerard Alexander if I'm being condescending by pointing this out.
P.S. Gerard, when Obama says to a Republican congressman "That's factually just not true, and you know it's not true." That isn't condescending, it's what Driftglass so accurately described as "unsheathing three feet of Verdad" and using it to carve up the disingenuous, dissembling, mendacious, prevaricating opposition - you know, the lying douchebag Republicans.

No jury would ever convict me

I suppose it runs in the family-- like father, like son and all that. If there is one thing drilled into my head as a child it was that you didn't act up when out in public. Nothing pissed off my father more than other people's kids carrying on noisily in a restaurant, hollering or crying or wandering table to table. It wasn't the kids he'd be ticked off at as much as the parents who didn't do anything about their children's obnoxious behaviour. My brother and I were usually pretty well-behaved in public and as a result got to go to some fairly swanky places with my mom and dad.
I am the same way with my kids. From the earliest ages, they have been taken into restaurants and museums and other "grown up" sorts of places and have always been well-behaved, to the extent that I have had strangers come up and compliment us on their table manners, maturity etc etc. (I know, I know, but like the man said "no brag, just the truth").
I have often been guilty of shooting the parents of misbehaving kids dirty looks and muttering "can't they shut that kid up?" to myself. I've even told small kids wandering table to table in restaurants that they should go back and sit with mommy and daddy, usually in a nice way. My own kids, now 7 and 9, will look at hollering, food-flinging four and five year olds in family restaurants with absolute horror and amazement, as if someone had come into the place with something from the zoo.
Only once have I ever had to deal with my kids chucking a wobbly in public and it was dealt with quickly and with a minimum of inconvenience to our fellow diners. My overtired, overstimulated, underfed son, then seven, once decided to cry in the middle of a restaurant because I wouldn't take him to the attatched karoke parlor at the end of a very busy kid-centered day. I told him to stop carrying on or we would leave, despite having already ordered dinner. He wouldn't quit, so out the door we went, leaving my wife and daughter with money to pay the bill. He hadn't done it before and hasn't since.
If your toddler is throwing a howling tantrum, do not walk away from them as if they were someone else's kid. If they are acting up, deal with the problem or take them home. I understand youthful exuberence and I understand that you don't like to impose boundaries on Junior and that you have your own parenting style or that maybe you're just sick and tired of dealing with your little (Hell's ) Angel. Tough luck, it's a basic social contract/civil society principle - supervise your own brats and don't let them annoy others. Please.

Having said all that, rest assured that if I see you in the Walmart with your crying two-year-old following you up and down the aisles, you will first have my sympathy. If the kid won't stop crying and you do nothing about it, you'll have my scorn. But if some grouchy old man decides to slap your toddler around to get it to shut up, you will not only have my enthusiastic support, I will even help you dispose of what is left of the presumptious old bastard's body.

Directing a wayward child back to its parents is acceptable. Even delivering a verbal scolding to a kid that is seriously out of line is, in some cases, justifiable, but unless you are pulling them out of the path of a speeding car or breaking up a fight, YOU DO NOT LAY HANDS ON OTHER PEOPLE'S KIDS. EVER.

Nevermind for a moment that slapping a two-year-old to get it to stop crying is like trying to put out a fire with a bucket of gasoline, you just don't physically interfere with other people's kids, let alone presume to strike them. You can argue the pro and cons of physical discipline and corporal punishment until the cows come home and reasonable people can perhaps disagree about whether parents should spank their kids, but when it comes to complete strangers slapping other people's kids, I think we can all agree its a very, very bad idea.

If I had been present at the Stone Mountain Walmart, the police would have been taking me away in handcuffs, not child-slapper Roger Stephens. He would be counting himself lucky to be leaving in an ambulance instead of a hearse.

"When in trouble or in doubt,

Run in circles, scream and shout"

Two thoughts on this video clip:

First, I see this kind of behavior every week. At my office, where some people need to work on their interpersonal skills and at the pool where I take my kids for swimming lessons, there is a bank of vending machines that sell canned coffee and soft drinks, bottles of cold green tea, water, sports drinks and, everyone's favorite -- ice cream. The room is stuffy and overheated and I'm there for a couple of hours along with all the other parents and the little brothers and sisters of the kids who are in the pool. I take my ipod and sit facing the ice cream machine and watch a succession of toddlers completely and utterly misplace their feces (occasionally this literally happens, but the diaper-throwing story is one for another day). I'm talking about two-, three- and four-year-old kids who see the ice cream machine and upon being denied a frosty treat, go straight to defcon 5 and launch the mother of all tantrums. 

The duration record so far this year is held by a three-year-old girl who, being told she could not have a second ice cream, launched into a 35-minute fit of floor-pounding, screeching, purple-faced rage that culminated in running across the room and repeatedly kicking her mother (the kid, not me) before actually falling asleep/passing out from lack of air mid tantrum. 

The intensity record was set by a three-year old boy who after jumping up and down hollering for a few minutes, ran straight into a concrete pillar in the center of the room and bloodied his nose, which seemed to calm him down a bit. 

For the record, my kids, while they might occasionally whine, never threw tantrums when they were little. In fact, with one notable exception when I had to take my son outside and explain that no, he could not go to karaoke in the bar adjoining the restaurant and crying at the table wasn't going to get him anywhere, they have always been extremely well behaved where ever we go. 

Second, the woman in the video is in the airport in Hong Kong. Its a good thing she's in a country that respects human rights as much as China. Imagine what might have happened if she had carried on like this in certain other places.

Welcome home
Nine-year-old Canadian Kevin Yourdkhani will soon be coming home to Toronto from the Hutto detention facility where he and Iranian parents have been held by U.S. Immigration authorities after they were found to be carrying false passports when their flight from South America to Canada made an unscheduled stop in the United States due to a medical emergency. The nine-year-old and his parents have been incarcerated for a month, but will soon be free - no thanks to Peter McKay or Stephen Harper who declined to intervene. Way to "Stand Up For Canada" guys.
Immigration Minister Diane Finlay has promised to grant the family a reprieve, which will be sufficient for them to get out of jail in the U.S. and come to Canada to try to get residency status. The parents were deported in 2005 after a ten year struggle to be accepted as refugees. They say they were arrested and tortured immediately after their return to Iran. Their son was born in Canada and is a Canadian citizen.

See, they aren't all wankers

A great big Woodshed thanks to Ralph Isenberg for being a real mensch.

Ralph Isenberg, a Dallas real estate developer whose Chinese-born wife has had her own struggles with immigration authorities, was so touched by Kevin's story he contacted Brouwer to offer help, including covering the family's airfare to Toronto.

"This is my apology to the Canadian people, to say sorry for the insensitivity of our government in taking a 9-year-old boy into custody in a maximum-security prison. Can you imagine what permanent damage it can cause to the child?" Isenberg said.

"Last I heard, Canada is one of our best allies, and this is how we treat our best friend from Canada? God only help you if you're the enemy of the U.S."

Standing up for Canada
Peter McKay is supposed to be hobnobbing with Condi Rice this weekend - do you think this family's case is likely to come up? Or will he be too busy trying to get to first base?

Canadian boy caught in Texas detention

Aircraft's chance landing in U.S. calamitous event for 9-year-old, his Iranian parents

Feb 16, 2007 04:30 AM

Michelle Shephard
Rick Westhead
Toronto Star Staff Reporters

A 9-year-old Canadian boy is in a Texas detention centre after his flight to Toronto made an unscheduled stop and U.S. officials detained his family.

Now the boy's Iranian parents are pleading with Canadian officials to help secure the family's release from the immigration holding facility, which has come under fire for allegedly detaining children in sub-standard conditions.

"All the time he is asking me, `Why am I wearing the uniform? Why I am here?'" the boy's mother said, as she sobbed during a telephone interview from the detention facility yesterday.

"We didn't do nothing. My child is innocent."

The parents, who have no status in Canada, asked that their names not be published out of fear of eventually being returned to Iran, where they say they were previously imprisoned and suffered physical and sexual abuse.