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To the Coward with the Cell Phone

In Tuesday’s post, I criticized a mother for giving in to her child’s spoiled tirade and whining about the legal ramifications. But there’s another irritant in this story: the anonymous bystander who video recorded the mother leaving her child in the car with a cell phone and then sent it to police.

Mood music:

Yeah, Kim Brook’s essay irritated me. The worst wasn’t her leaving the kid in the car or her failure to lay down the law. It was her defensive drivel, which lacked any kind of lesson readers could benefit from.

But I don’t blame her one bit for wishing that bystander had approached her instead of quietly recording her failure and dropping a dime. Maybe that person thought they were being a responsible citizen. But the act was cowardly.

To stand in the shadows recording someone is pathetic at best. It would be understandable if the bystander were recording a mob hit or an act of political corruption. Getting caught could lead to bodily harm in those circumstances. But in this case the bystander was recording an unarmed woman. If leaving the kid in the car was such a reprehensible act in this person’s opinion, the better, more courageous thing to do would have been to get in Brook’s face and tell her she was an idiot for endangering her child that way.

Chances are Brooks would have been mortified by her own behavior and I doubt she’d ever leave her son in the car again after that.

It would have been the best possible outcome.

Whoever the bystander is, I hope they feel like shit for:

  • Being too much of a chicken shit to confront Brooks directly.
  • Setting a legal process in motion that cost a lot of people time, money and emotional well-being. Brooks was stupid, but the punishment was way over the top. She caved and had a moment of bad judgement, but she’s not a child abuser by all outward appearances.
  • Bringing Brooks to a state of mind where she felt the need to defend herself in a column that was torture for the reader.

This whole affair illustrates how outrageously unreasonable our society has become.

Cell phone screen that says Big Brother is watching you

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The Spoiled Brat, the Whiney Mom and the Damage Done

Parents screw up. I certainly do. Most acknowledge a mistake when they make it. So when someone leaves a 4 year old in the car and writes a rambling essay about all the legal woe that came of it, I struggle to sympathize.

Mood music:

Kim Brooks writes about her mistake in Salon.com in the essay “The Day I Left My Son in the Car.” She writes of a harrowing morning getting her kids on a plane and making a last-minute trip to the store because her son misplaced his headphones. It was going to be a long flight, and she couldn’t board without headphones so the kid could use his iPad and keep quiet.

At the last minute, the boy announces he’s going with her. Despite her better instincts, she relents. When they reach the store, he announces he’s not leaving the car; he’s too busy with the iPad.

So she lets him stay, figuring she’ll just be a minute. She returns to the car and a safe-and-sound son five minutes later. After the flight, Brooks discovers she’s in a heap of trouble because a bystander used a cellphone to record her leaving the child and later returning. The bystander sent the recording to police.

The rest of the essay chronicles her dealings with lawyers and law enforcement and how absolutely awful it all was. If she has a lesson to share, it’s buried beneath all the whining.

I want to sympathize. She didn’t act maliciously. She made a split-second decision. A bad one, but find me a parent who hasn’t and I’ll eat a live worm.

Here’s what’s truly outrageous to me: She admits giving in to a seemingly spoiled brat:

“I don’t want to go in,” my son said as I opened the door. He was tapping animated animals on a screen, dragging them from one side to the other. “I don’t want to go in. I changed my mind.”

He glanced up at me, his eyes alight with what I’d come to recognize as a sort of pre-tantrum agitation. “No, no, no, no, no! I don’t want to go in,” he repeated, and turned back to his game.

And then I did something I’d never done before. I left him. I told him I’d be right back. I cracked the windows and child-locked the doors and double-clicked my keys so that the car alarm was set. And then I left him in the car for about five minutes.

The rest of the essay goes something like this: “He didn’t die. He wasn’t kidnapped.” Why then, was she being punished?

Here’s why, Kim:

You should have made him go in. Better yet, when he refused to get out, you should have driven back without the headphones and confiscated the iPad. Sure, he’d have screamed bloody murder. But he would have learned something.

Do us all a favor: Instead of writing essays like this, why don’t you discipline your child instead?

Thanks.

Baby crying