Children are little people too...

I recently visited a jewellery shop in the town where I live. I was looking for a present for my wife and I had my two small children with me.

My wife had told me what she wanted, all I had to do was buy it. Easy, right?

The sales assistant, was assisting another customer who was wearing a cowboy hat. I'm not sure why, exactly, that was needed in the West of England on a Saturday morning.

Perhaps she ran Britains first steer herding ranch; nonetheless, she looked like she would spend some money and the sales assistant was, well, assisting her.

The sales assistant eyed me my two little children as we approached and smiled nervously, but carried on with her customer.

I browsed around, and my children became rapidly more bored and more interested in all the things in the cupboards and on the shelves in the shop.

I started issuing streams of instructions (as I do) "don't touch that, come over here, stand there, don't move..." and various informational and diversionary orders and comments issued forth as I attempted to buy some time to complete the transaction.

In the back room was a table set as for dinner, displaying some of the things that the shop had to sell. As soon as my family and I entered that room, the shop assistant broke off from schmoozing Rawhide and slid over to me:

"Excuse me, there are knives on the table".
I was a bit fazed.."Oh, okay," I said. I was at a loss as to the relevance.
"I wouldn't want them to hurt themselves".

Now, my children can be a bit wild, it's true, and on this particular Saturday morning they were getting bored. Bored with shopping, bored with shops, bored with Mummy's present. Bored.

However, they are unlikely to reach up onto a table, grab a knife and hurt themselves with it. That's just not how kids work.

At that point in time, one was lying on the floor, looking at a print of a fox hunt. The other was looking out of the window at the back of the shop.

The sales assistant Tonto'd back over to The Lone Ranger and turned her smile back on.

By this time, my children had started supplicating, "Daddy, can we" this, "Daddy, can we" that.

Now, Chisholm was starting to tut each time one of the children started a bored whine.
"Excuse me", I said, loudly. "Yes sir", said Tonto, "I'll be with you in one minute".

Now, forgive me all you people out there who fixated on the noisy or disruptive child aspect of this story. I meet people like you all the time. Once, I worried about you; about how you felt because we were disturbing your lunch or your conversation, or your dog was so interesting that you had to stop and force an impatient smile while we petted it and asked what its name was.

Once, I worried about your disapproving glares in restaurants, your tuts or mumbled comments over the adjacent table as one of my children said, "Yuck!", was bored or threw a bread roll.

Once, in fact, I was you.

Then I realised something. Children, you see, are people. Little people, with their own minds, wishes, desires and most have an insatiable interest in everything around them. And you know what annoys you? They don't care what you think. That's annoying, isn't it?
I mean you know the rules - sure, maybe you don't always obey them when you're, say, driving - but you follow the rules when it suits you and it suits you right now.

So kids making noise while you eat your lunch is spoiling something for you right now, and you'd rather that they weren't there.

Don't get me wrong - I don't expect anyone to sit and listen to my children scream and shout, or have a tantrum, as they sometimes do, because I wouldn't like that myself.

If we are in a shop or a restaurant, and if it's possible, I take them outside, - if not, I use our rewards system to discipline them, which doesn't always work, but I try.

Whilst I want them to learn appropriate conduct in different situations, the important word there is learn; learning takes time and you need to make some mistakes.

So as we left the shop, one of us had a little temper tantrum and slapped the front window really hard. A startled and horrified shop assistant glared at me. I grinned, waved and mouthed "Bye!"...and bought my present somewhere else.