What is wrong with parents?
Today, my wife and I went to see two vastly different films, Wall-E and The Dark Knight (reviews to follow). In both films, there were families in the audience that made me want to go up to the parents and say “What are you thinking?! You have an important role to play as a parent, and you’re screwing it up!”
For the family in Wall-E, that would have been a bit of overkill, I grant you. The father was there with his two boys, probably around 5-7 years old. I don’t have any problem with kids being in that theater - in fact, I expected kids to be in attendance for that one. The problem was that the younger boy was repeatedly, and loudly, talking during the movie. I don’t blame the kid (much). He was just excited and wanted to show his dad that he understood what was going on (it’s possible that he’d seen the movie before, judging from some of what he said). The problem is that the father didn’t take the opportunity to teach the child to be quiet, and courteous to others. Eventually the brother said something to him, and then his dad chimed in, somewhat ineffectively, in telling the boy to quiet down. That’s just backwards. Why was the brother taking the lead there?
There were also a pair of older kids - teens - loudly bounding up and down the stairs and across the front of the seats, so that may have made me a bit more irritable toward the talker. But still… if the father doesn’t teach their kid to be courteous now, he’s just setting the kid up to become that bounder in a few years.
But the one that really bothered me was the family in The Dark Knight. They didn’t bother me because they were disruptive, mostly, but because they were there. These parents brought a 2 or 3 year old girl to an extremely loud, very violent movie. The second the movie started, she began to cry. And who can blame her? The noise alone was an assault to her senses! The parents didn’t take her out of the theater. They did comfort her in her seat, but come on… for the first 10 minutes of the movie, every time the audio quieted down a bit (which was not often), I could hear her crying. Eventually, that stopped, but I am still really disappointed that these people would subject their young daughter to sitting still that long (3 hours, from the time they first sat down) without relief, let alone for a film that is so clearly not something she should be seeing. It’s just wrong.
Parents have the responsibility for teaching their kids, and for protecting them - in big ways, and small ways. These examples are two of the small ways. Sometimes the small ways bother me more, because they’re easy to overlook, but add up to more problems later.
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