It Finally Happened

For some years now I’ve been trying to deal with a reputation for not liking children, which I feel is completely undeserved. Part of it stems from the fact that I was single for all of those years, while the majority of my friends married, had children, and succumbed (to one extent or another) into the obsession the late George Carlin called “The Cult of the Child” – the belief that the world revolves around children in general, and their particular child most of all. I can understand why parents feel that way – and I imagine that doing so is probably an evolutionary survival trait. But like anything else, it causes problems if taken to extremes, as in the case of parents who can’t understand why the rest of us don’t enjoy listening to their child shrieking as much as they do. So, for the record, and hopefully for the last time, I have no issue whatsoever with children; I just don’t like badly behaved ones. It makes me want to slap their parents…

In the case of one young boy from New York, it would appear that law enforcement has already done some of that for me. You can pick up the story from the local CBS affiliate station if you’d like, but what they are reporting is that a woman in East Garden City, New York, has been arrested for leaving her seven-year-old son unattended at the Lego store in their local mall while she went shopping. After 90 minutes or so the child became frightened, and the store manager called security, who in turn called the police. Persons familiar with the case are quoted as saying that the mother thought there were store employees who looked after children playing in the store, despite the fact that Lego stores do not offer that service, there is no designated play area, no release forms to sign, no one to take responsibility for the children, or indeed, any reason to believe that anyone would be watching out for a child left alone…

Now, I’m fairly sure that some people reading this blog (assuming anyone reads this blog) are going to have trouble with my comparing a parent abandoning a child in order to go shopping at the mall to parents who follow their children around constantly but refuse to discipline them for any reason. After all, one of these behaviors is considered neglect, while the other is considered over-protective or obsessive, depending on your point of view. But in addition to spending decades as a childless bachelor, I’ve also spent a number of years now as a college instructor, and I am telling you that neither of these parental behaviors are doing the children any favors. Although, to be fair, anybody who has had to deal with teenagers, college students, or entry-level employees in the last decade or so could tell you the same thing…

As usual, I’m going to leave the moralizing about this topic to people who are better qualified, and just point out that both ends of the spectrum are problematic from a business standpoint. Nobody wants to deal with entitled employees who believe that they should be given lavish rewards for doing exactly what they please – because that’s what their parents always did. At the same time, no one wants to deal with parents using our place of business as a free daycare center because they can’t be bothered to take care of their own children. And since we can’t influence how people raise their children, we will have to work on this from the other end – by establishing clear and explicit performance standards, writing company policies that require accountability as well as performance, teaching business classes that encourage discipline and teamwork, and rewarding employees who live up to those standards…

And when absolutely necessary, calling the police and having the courage to risk legal action, criticism from Monday-morning quarterbacks, and reprimand from higher management ranks when we report some idiot for leaving innocent children in dangerous situations…