Is it OK to tell off other people’s kids?
Discipline is essential when you’re raising your kids (or grandkids!), but what about when it comes to other parents’ children? If you see kids behaving badly in public, do you have the right to tell them off? That’s the question on one mum’s lips after she did just that.
Laura Mazza, mum-of-two and popular blogger, was supervising her kids Luca and Sofia at a public play centre when she spotted two children pushing and hitting her son as he was about to go down a slide, and two other children ramming into her daughter with a mini driveable car.
She felt she had to intervene. “I actually found myself saying, ‘That's not nice, stop!’” she wrote on Facebook. “I’ve never liked to tell a stranger’s kid off, but if you’re gonna pretend you can’t see it because you wanna sit and chat, then I’m gonna tell your child off.”
Chatting to 9Honey, the Melbourne-based mum said the boy who pushed her son and pulled his hair didn’t seem to be bothered by her reprimanding him.
“I actually looked at him while my son was crying and said, ‘That was really mean',” she recalls. “They had that doe-eyed look that kids have when they know they have done something wrong.”
Of course, Mazza doesn’t exactly feel comfortable telling another person’s kid off.
“No one wants to tell someone else’s child ‘no’. It’s not nice and it’s not our responsibility. It’s really tough to see a kid hurt yours and know you have to protect your own child.”
As for the naughty kids’ parents? Despite being busy chatting, they had seen the incident but didn’t seem to care.
Tell us in the comments below, do you think it’s acceptable to reprimand another person’s child in certain circumstances? Or is it never OK?