Children are to be seen, not heard

The children's department at IKEA is really a monument to excellence in parenting. On any typical Saturday or Sunday, we'll see anywhere between 10,000 and 15,000 people, a good number of those visitors being children. So, as you can imagine, I get to experience numerous parental encounters.

My department is directly adjacent to the children's department, so I have the distinct pleasure of hearing kids scream their faces off all day. If they're in the children's department, they're probably crying because either their parents won't buy them what they want, or they don't want what their parents are buying them. If they're in my department, they're screaming because they want to go to the children's department. Either way, they're screaming. Usually, I can just get over it and ignore the kids, but for some reason, there was an abundance of obnoxious children today, just screaming their faces off, which prompted me to get sterilized on my lunch break.

But back to the art of parenting. There are really three typical parental responses to infantile noise production: ignore it, quash it, or mimic it.

While I generally agree that ignoring children is really the best policy, I have to draw the line somewhere. Countless mothers come strolling through my department with children literally siezing with anger, and they ignore it completely. One woman was asking me for help picking out a mattress while her son sat in the cart crying uncontrollably. She was apparently unaware of his existence, but I couldn't look away for fear he'd have an aneurysm. I liken it to sleeping through your alarm clock going off all night - you know it's ringing, but you pretent it's not there, and eventually, it just manifests itself as a violent dream. Except in this case, the alarm clock is a screaming child, and the violent dream is Andrea Yates. Yikes.

Then there are those parents who are incapable of ignoring their crying children - the first-time mother desperately doting on her screaming baby, the militant father barking orders at his miscreant children, or the incompetent mom publicly insulting her children into submission. The last is my personal favorite. I remember being spanked in the grocery store once or twice for bad behavior, but on more than one occasion, I've seen mothers slap their children in the face or scream obscenities to shut them up. Just before closing today, two women came through the department, one of them with a daughter. The women were talking, the daughter, no older than six or seven, walking behind. The daughter saw some display she liked and yelled "Mom, isn't that beautiful." Mom responded "SHUT UP. I'M NOT TALKING TO YOU." Like I said, parenting at its finest.

Finally, we have the parents who insist on acting like their children. The worse the kids act, the worst the customer acts. On weekday afternoons, the store is usually pretty empty, just a few customers here and there. A few weeks ago, a woman approached me with a fussy looking child in her cart. As she talked to me, the child started making noise, so the woman just talked louder. As the child got more and more out of control, the woman got louder and more irritable. I clearly had no patience for bitchy women or children, so I just got dismissive in an attempt to get rid of them, but this woman just kept talking at me louder and louder. Eventually, I just said "you know, we have child care." She was apparently so incensed by the implication that she couldn't control her child that she got all huffy and walked away. Mission accomplished.

On a side note, IKEA's child care is known for having a ball pit. Think about this, though, the next time you want to jump into a ball pit. We used to have two ball pits - one in the the child care area, and one up in the showroom. They did away with the one in the showroom after a child had explosive diarrhea in the ballpit and all the kids playing in it got coated in feces. Now they apparently wash all the balls in the ball pit on a regular basis, though if you ask me, you can never wash away an experience like diving into a pit of diarrhea.

I'll leave you with a "kids say the darndest things" moment from last week. One of the display rooms in the department has two ottomans sitting at the foot of the bed. They're small, round ottomans, just big enough for one person. A mother came in with two kids, a boy and a girl, who had clearly been cooped up in the store for too long. She told them to sit on the ottomans while she looked around. As she walked away, the boy bent over and started clenching his face. I thought he was pissed off or something, but he looked at his sister and they laughed, then she started doing the same. They sat there, bent over, making weird faces until their mother walked by them, at which point the boy yelled "look mom, we're pooping."