  Last weekend I went to Ikea with my parents. First of all, there is no reason to go to the Houston Ikea until August 4, b/c their entire stock is whittled down to perhaps 20% in their efforts to sell their inventory rather than move it to the new building. Big mistake guys. We'd made our way through the upstairs showrooms and were browsing downstairs when we first heard a little girl, probably about four, screaming from the bottom of her lungs, devil-style. I wouldn't have been surprised to see split pea soup spew from her mouth. Her mom was yelling back, not really yelling at her, but trying to be heard over the noise of her daughter, to sit down in the cart. A younger girl sat in the cart's childseat, and watched the scene unfold in silence. The really surreal part of the show was that the mother was still trying to get some shopping in, she moved slowly through the giant warehouse that is the Ikea lower level, all the while yelling at her daughter to sit down and her daughter screaming non-stop, in wild bursts of possessed animal sounds.
People can be rude, and in tough situations with a loud child, they will be even worse. Some people stood and stared, one woman said sarcastically, "oh my, there is a child screaming. " Two girls looking twenty talked loudly about the woman's obvious need to smack that child. The entire scene, and especially the sound of the out-of-control child, made me nauseous.
Primarily, I felt so bad for the whole family. This will surely be a painful memory for everyone involved. My mom asked me if there was anything I could/should do to help. I thought intervening at all would only formalize their humiliation and be rejected. Besides, this is the kind of issue that shows its ugly head if longterm parenting preventions are not put in place. That brings me to the purpose of this blog entry: how can we parents make sure we don't find ourselves and our children in such a difficult position.
One of the most important parenting lessons I've learned, and one that would have been instrumental for that family, is to enforce your boundaries at home in your nice voice. There are two parts to that. First, enforce your boundaries at home. Don't let yourself slide. You'll want to have room to slide on those boundaries when you're in public (or around family, or in a similarly strange or difficult situation). Second is do your enforcing in your nice voice. In our home, John and I have to watch ourselves for this weakness for using a voice that is strained or angrier than we intend to sound. And sometimes it's tempting to make our voices harsh in an effort to enforce without the enforcing consequence: "now" or "I mean it" are typical follies. We once accidentally taught our dog to lay down when we said now instead of lay down because we only enforced him after saying now. The same could happen with kids when parents count before enforcing. When we're doing our best, we sound positive when talking to the kids even when disciplining them. The real benefit of enforcing in the nice voice is that your kids know you mean business when you're using the nice voice in public. And parents really have to try to use the nice voice in restaurants, stores, or other public places. Making yourself use the nice voice also helps keep you from getting too angry when the kids are in trouble, useful because kids are so good at pushing parental anger buttons.
Plus, it's good for their self esteem and overall developmenet if you talk to them in positive voices. One study cited in What's Going on in There: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years shows that kids verbal development is directly correlated to the occurance of negative feedback from their caregivers. This little girl was in trouble for not sitting in the big part of the shopping cart. I've personally seen fidgety kids knock the cart over from that spot, it's pretty dangerous. I bet her mom knew this, and accepted the risk because she couldn't trust the girl to be good out of the cart.
Ikea's a big store, big enough to try the most obedient kid's patience. That's probably why they offer a kids' playroom with licensed caregivers in which you can leave your kids while shopping. I've always been too chicken to use it, though. It's hard for Americans to trust public childcare. The mom could have reserved a busyhand object for the second level (one of my favorites is an apple.
it can take each of my kids at least 30 minutes to lose interest in eating an apple whole. lacing boards also work, my son has graduated his lacing toys to knot-tying adventures and they're taking over my house!). Some stores offer carts with two child's seats, you can spot these carts by their ridiculous appearance as fire trucks or cars. Wary of the nag pressure to always use them, we've never used one. Probably key in causative factors here is a history of letting the kid slide by boundaries.
Parents have it pretty hard, they don't get to slack, not even one day. For if they do, the kid will not appreciate the slacking and adhere to the new, lower boundary. They will instead assume all bets are off regarding boundaries and accordingly press them all. Developmentally, I think it's more correct to say the kid feels insecure with the lapse in boundaries and they'll push other boundaries in an effort to reclaim moral certitude.
How do you enforce boundaries in public? You don't. And that brings us to my last point. No parent could possible act in grace under the glaring eyes of fifty people and, with the probable presence of a security camera, the entire country's nightly news audience if you slip up. Plus, kids deserve the respect of being disciplined in private rather than in front of their peers. I think the mom might not have found her child quite so beastly had she moved the whole scream and yell operation immediately to the bathroom or car at the first sign of a problem. 
