Rant

NOTE: The entire following post is directed at bad parents.  Please disregard if this does not apply to you.  

Would it kill you to teach your kids some freaking manners???  I'm talking basic stuff: please, thank you, excuse me.  Teach them to wait their turn instead of cutting in line.  For God's sake, teach them that the universe does NOT revolve around their precious little selves.  And if the reason your kids have no manners is that YOU have no manners and they are merely living the example that they see, you really suck.

And while you're at it, why don't you teach your kids to be decent human beings, too?  Not to hit or push or worse when they don't get their way.  Not to treat servers and clerks and store personnel like dirt.  Not to seek weakness in others and exploit it for fun.  Bullies suck worst of all, and they are made at home, either through mistreatment or through failure to require appropriate behavior.  Parent FAIL either way.  And the comment above about kids living the example they see goes double here.

The 14 year-old in my taekwondo class, the one so stressed about the mean girls at her school that she was crying in class about not wanting to go to high school last week, came to class tonight with cutting marks on her arm.  I want to pound the parents of her tormentors into the ground and then stomp on them.  What the fuck, people???  Don't you know what kind of kids you have?  Don't you care???

Believe me, I don't think I have all the parenting answers.  Himself and I are muddling through this whole parenting thing as best we can and doubtless making mistakes left and right along the way.  But we're actually trying.  We set expectations and follow through with consequences.  And we'll be damned if we let our kids make us look like bad parents by being ill-mannered, unkind, badly behaved louts, because they know better and so do we!!

So pissed right now.