"Note to self: Stop. Doing. Anything."

I’ve been noticing various parenting styles recently. The more I take Abbie into places where young children congregate, the more opportunity I have to watch other parents in action. I can learn through careful observation of successful breeders important parenting skills, at the same time Abbie can learn by watching older children in active play all sorts of bad habits to annoy us. My opportunities to watch parents work increased dramatically recently as several new residents with young children moved in, and they use the communal park much more than their predecessors. This could be because the newness of the park for them creates a novelty that they want to enjoy now but will soon forget about, like a child receiving a new toy or a sane human watching “Hogan Knows Best.” It could also be because the new residents have children in that magic age range of 6-36 months who are incapable of entertaining themselves so everyone takes them out to the park because they’ve run out of things to do inside. Taking young children outside always amuses them, possibly because of the infinite number of objects that can be inserted in the mouth. Our complex’s former residents had older children who, when their parents tired of keeping them busy, could leave them alone and know they’d find a way to entertain themselves, or, better yet, take them to school.

After comparing myself to these new parents, I see that I actually have a fairly involved parenting style. This comes as a bit of a surprise to me since I always assumed that watching Abbie repeatedly fall while trying to walk gave me a hands-off style that would concern most child-protection authorities. My philosophy in public is don’t intervene in her affairs unless she’s doing something dangerous, naughty, or just plain crying. Her most common dangerous activity is sticking random objects in her mouth, such as grass or other plants, rocks, woodchips, bugs, and long-discarded food remnants. Even though the rational parent in me knows she could likely munch on all of these things without harm, the emotional parent in me sees these objects as covered with horrible diseases that would make Ebola feel like a stiff neck after sleeping wrong, and besides they’re woodchips! Why for the love of god do you insist on shoving woodchips in your mouth? Naughty behaviors include taking things from other children; if someone else has it, she wants it. Pacifiers are especially maddening since she has never shown much interest in them unless a nearby child happens to be sucking on one, in that situation I have to repeatedly knock her hands away to prevent her from stealing it for her mouth. Crying I have much less tolerance for when we’re in public instead of inside by ourselves. If we’re alone, I’ll usually let her cry for a minute to see if she can work through it on her own. Doing so builds character, plus it frees me to watch pivotal moments in Cubs games. When other people are around, I try to comfort her quickly, partially because she generally has a good reason for crying when she’s outside, and partially because I don’t want to look like the kind of parent who lets his child cry for a minute to see if she can work through it on her own.

These seem like good guidelines to me, but they give me a more active parenting role than our neighbors. I’ll often see behavior that I would correct go ignored. Sometimes parents don’t do anything when their child walks right in the pathway of an active swing. This may be because they have multiple children, and another one happens to be doing something even more dangerous at the time. This may also be because of the communal nature of the park where we all look out for each other’s children. In the swing scenario, I’ll do my part and warn the child to be more careful. Other parents have swooped in to knock the woodchips from Abbie’s fingers before I could intervene, so I’ve benefited from the commune.

The most ignored behaviors seem to be rude behaviors. When I see children struggling to share, I want to jump in and referee, but then I see the parents standing on the sidelines often ignoring the scrum. I figure they know something I don’t, like children need to learn to work through these things on their own so go ahead and let them reach a compromise they both can accept by themselves, or maybe it’s just the billionth time today they’ve fought over a toy so unless there’s blood involved I don’t care. Specifically, there was the time Abbie came up to a 2-year-old girl who was blowing bubbles and tried to grab the bubble wand. The little girl looked horribly offended, then leaned into Abbie’s face to scream, “Go away.” I thought this was too rude and if it had been my daughter I would have told her to be nice and not yell, but then I noticed the girl’s mother standing a few feet away not paying attention and figured that since Abbie shouldn’t have tried to grab the bubble wand in the first place, maybe ignoring the situation would help both girls learn some social consequences on their own. Then again, this is the same little girl whose mother ignored her while she ate woodchips until she threw up, so maybe that’s a bad example.