Tears

I don't want to discourage anyone who is expecting a baby (or trying to get pregnant), but if you spent a couple of days at the railway, you might be more aware of what lies ahead.

As I have mentioned before, we have a train table in the shop for the kids to play with. Sometimes parents find it nearly inmpossible to get the kids to leave it behind, even to get on the train to take their ride. At least once a day, after trying for a long time to reason with a child or bribe him or her, parents wind up grabbing the kid around the waist and walking out in the middle of screams and tears. Recently we had a kid who cried and stood screaming outside the shop, refusing to go with his mother to get on the train with his sibs. She finally got him on, but he cried throughout the trip and until she finally brought him back into the store afterwards. Then she had to go through it all over again when they really had to leave. The last I saw (heard) him, he was still red-faced and hysterical.

He was about three or four years old.

That was probably the worst scene, but a screaming two-year-old is a many-times-daily occurrence. It is a developmental thing, apparently. There is a general consensus that the terrible twos is not a myth. The good news, as Tom told a friend some time back who was struggling with hers, is that they grow out of it. The bad news is that they go on to become surly teenagers.

It is interesting to watch parents try to reason with the children. While it is obvious that young children can be taught what they can and cannot do, it also seems to be true that until a child is six or seven, they cannot grasp clearly the meaning of right/wrong in the way adults do. As a result, a child can learn not to tear up the newspaper before daddy has read it, but the young child will not realize that there is something wrong about that. They need to grow up a bit more. I don't know what the answer is, but it has to be something else. I know from watching it day after day that the "Let's talk ethics" approach is not going to cut it with a child who can't yet say ethics without lisping.

It is a bit like people who think that speaking English loudly and slowly to a non-English speaker will make it intelligible. I mean, no matter how loudly and slowly someone spoke Chinese to me, I just wouldn't get it.

Anyway, as the Boy Scouts told you, Justin, Be Prepared.