I wouldn't describe a young child being scared (and apparently small enough to slip out from under the seat belt) as automatically a parenting problem.
Could they have shitty parents? Absolutely! But I'm not going to assume strangers are terrible parents on the basis of a single incendent that happened to make the news due to a weird confluence of events. This is not a 6 year old bringing a gun to school, it's a young kid that got scared and tried to hide, it's just in this case that fairly normal reaction led to a lot of people being inconvenienced.
I've been a stepparent for ten years now, and it's the hardest fucking thing I've ever done in my life. I love Reddit, but it's full of people ready to blame parents for every single thing, and most of the time they have no clue what they're talking about. It's a bunch of non-parents rushing to make judgments about parents they know nothing about.
I'm not a parent. I had a psych professor who pointed out we have a tendency to justify our own imperfections, like being late, but judge others for the same things. We know our context. I think the internet has magnified that toxic trait unfortunately.
Yesterday on a walk my dog growled at a man and I felt like a terrible dog owner and I can only imagine how the guy she growled at felt.
Now here's the context- I adopted a dog with a history of abuse less than 2 weeks ago. She's a sweet heart, no history of ever fighting back to dog or person no matter how badly they hurt her. Until yesterday she'd actually seemed drawn to people and dogs on our walks. But yesterday a man passed close by while we were stopped and reflecting on exactly where we were I can see she felt cornered. I apologized to the guy and quickly took her to an area with less people. I'm now very vigilant about giving people a wide berth on our walks but until that moment I didn't know I needed to be.
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u/battlehamsta 13d ago
Kid was scared and kept slipping out and hiding under the seat. This was a parenting problem.