Yesterday in the check-out line at Target I stood behind a mother and her tweenage son during what could only be described as an extremely tense moment.
From what I gathered the son wanted to leave Target and meet his friends at the mall’s food court. Unfortunately for the kid, his mother had other plans for him. Long story short the son began throwing a temper tantrum as we slowly crept closer to the cashier. He started with a barrage of insults. First, loudly accusing his mother of being addicted to cigarettes, caffeine, and her Blackberry, then he tried grabbing for her purse in order to extract her said smart phone to call a friend to pick him up because he didn’t want to drive home with his alleged chain-smoking mother. Finally, he tried grabbing for his mother’s wallet, at which point the woman lost it. She grabbed the kid’s arm, twisted his body, and unleashed a litany of profane words.
Not exactly a stellar moment for either one of them.
I don’t know the back story to the drama I witnessed, so I will resist making a judgment here. However, I think the situation clearly speaks to parental breaking points.
A while back I remember reading an article about an argument a columnist got into with his 11-year-old son over breakfast at a popular fast food chain.
As he tells it, he got so angry with the boy that he drove out of the restaurant’s parking lot without his kid. The eatery was a few blocks from their house, and during the solo drive home, he says he had a chance to cool down and went back to pick up his kid.
The problem is that when he rolled back into the restaurant’s parking lot a police officer was waiting for him.
This dad let his kid push him to his breaking point, and now he has to pay the price for it. Felony charges seem a bit extreme to me, but apparently, the District Attorney disagreed and wanted to make a case out of this man’s anger and poor parental decision making. Subsequently, all charges were dropped in this case, and authorities did not pursue the case.
Everyone has a different breaking point, though if you are a parent with a child who knows exactly how to push your buttons, then you might be at higher risk for meltdowns.
What’s your parental breaking point?