I was annoyed in town today by the attitude of strangers towards the mother of a child who was throwing a tantrum. The little girl seemed to be a little older than Alexander,who is nearly four years old. Yes admittedly she was creating one hell of a racket, but her mum was trying her best to resolve the situation. Once the mother had said her piece she walked on with the child behind still performing and screaming.

As I walked into a shop the two old biddy's in front of me were verbally ripping this mother to bits. Saying how children didn't behave like that in her day, and how the child needed a damn good seeing to, and how poor this woman was as a mother.

One of the old ladies walked away, and the other came besides me, and was clearly not through with putting down this other mother, and expecting me to agree with her as for once my little boy was being a little angel!

She picked the wrong woman this time! I told her very nicely that we can't possibly know what the problem was with the child and that we have no right to judge. I told her that I have a child with mild autism, and if he started to perform that there was little I could do to defuse the situation. Her response to this was that anyone can see the difference between a child who has something wrong with it and naughty child. To this, again I had to disagree. I told her that no one could tell if my son has a mental disability just by looking at him. He looks perfectly normal. Off she stormed with a sour look on her face.


It is now against the law to smack a child hard enough to leave a mark on it's body. What good is a tap on the hand?

Parents these days have to resort to different methods of control. We have to get down to the child's level and tell them that they are being naughty. Then if this does not work we have to ignore the behavior as it is thought that continually responding to the child is giving the child what it wants; your attention.

The real question is Why should it bother passers by anyway? After all they can walk away, the parent can't.
Just because we don't beat our children does not mean that we are raising the next generation of yobs and hooligans, it just means that we are not physically abusing them.

I am not a soft mother. I expect good behavior from my children and those which I am taking care of. I don't always get what I want, and when Alexander is screaming around town, I let him scream the tantrum away. He still has to do what it is that I want him to do one way or another. He gets ignored until he behaves. The minute he behaves he gets rewarded with my attention. The tantrums soon go away.

Do people really want to see us hitting our children?