Walk / Don't Walk

San Francisco's Embarcadero. 5:30 pm today. A man and his child, maybe five years old. Don't walk. The man restrains his son. "Don't jump out, it's red!" he says. And on either side of him, people are crossing against the red.

That was me and my daughter, a dozen years ago. As a parent, you've learned from painful experience that children imitate what they see. If Johnny next door eats grasshoppers, you can be sure that your kid will try it too. Once the child is older, you let them see what they will (if you're smart), and you teach them what's acceptable and what's not. But at more tender ages, you want to isolate them from those things you don't want them to imitate, knowing that words won't stop them like they will later (at least, until they reach adolescence, when all bets are off).

This is why parents of young children want the world to be well-behaved. It's how you keep your children well-behaved. There are only so many things you can keep them from doing, and you don't want to waste those shalt nots on grasshoppers, when it's more important to spend it on kicking and biting. People without children don't want to be well-behaved, and resent having their behavior constrained by the presence of children.

There should be a place you can live for seven years where people act properly in front of children. After that, you move back to the real world.

Yeah, like that's gonna happen.


Blog Tag: Chatter   Blog Tag: San Francisco