I broke The Golden Rule

I’ve been in two minds about this post. About this entire topic really. I’ve been vacillating wildly all week ... should I, shouldn’t I, will I, won’t I, can I, can’t I. It’s been a bit dizzying to say the least. 

So I wrote it, and then I left it. I slept on it. It’s sometimes best to sleep on things. I’m sure we’ve all done things that we later thought we should really have slept on. Sent an email, or a text or a dreaded fb message. And then all hell breaks loose. Whoops! Mostly there’s no going back. So with this topic I left it for a day or two. And then I thought, stuff it, I’m going to post it, because it’s really how I feel. Post it and be damned.

Parents can be a real nightmare! 

There I said it. 

Parents can be a real nightmare (I said it again. It’s quite cathartic).

We all know that kids can be a nightmare too. Frequently. That’s OK. Everyone knows that, but mostly people accept it because they are, well...kids. But parents? Parents should know better. Parents can give parents a bad name. 

So, I’m on the Manly ferry on a Friday afternoon with Picky and Pearl. The three of us have been in the City for an hour or two. 


Picky grinds her teeth. That’s by the by, except that she was at the dentist in the City to collect a plastic guard that will apparently stop the constant grinding at night. Teeth grinding is apparently a common problem. Everyone’s doing it. The world is full of people who grind their teeth. Especially at night. It's pretty much a nocturnal problem, like possums in Oz and foxes in London.

Whilst Picky's was with the dentist, I let Pearl run around Martin Place. She likes to chase the pigeons. To be honest they don’t seem to mind too much. In any case, she’s never caught one. 

The three of us then hopped on the Manly ferry and headed home. The ferry was busy. During summer they lay on extra ferries to transport hoards of locals and tourists between the Circular Quay in the city & the beach at Manly. I don’t blame them - the beach at Manly is stunning. I reckon that the Manly Ferry is probably the best journey on public transport anywhere in the world. I read once that the Staten Island ferry between Manhattan and Staten Island was officially given this honour. I’ve been on both and I reckon the Manly Ferry is better. It’s a close run thing, and the Staten Island ferry is free (or it might be a quarter these days due to the GFC). The Manly Ferry is $7.00 each way & it's worth every cent. Plus you get free wi-fi.

OK, so we’re on a packed ferry on a hot Friday afternoon, we’re sitting inside and there’s a couple of mums in the row behind us, each with a couple of kids - two babies and two aged somewhere around 5 or 6. The two older ones are playing. I say playing. Not really. They were playing at first. And then they stopped playing & started screaming. First at each other. And then at their mums. When I say screaming I really do mean screaming. Screa-Ming! As loud as they could. Louder than they could. They were trying to see who could scream the loudest. And for the longest. For at least ten or fifteen minutes. Neither was going to be the first to stop. It was a game to them. It was that good old 'which one of us can scream the loudest for the longest' game. On a packed ferry on a hot Friday afternoon. 

Their mums? Well, they just sat there, happily chatting to each other, two meters from their two screaming kids. To be fair, they did stop chatting when the screaming started. They had to. They couldn’t chat above the dreadful screaming. 

The kids weren’t upset, they hadn’t had an accident, they weren’t crying. They were just screaming at the top of their voices. As loud as their little lungs would let them. For fun. Their mums did nothing. Nothing at all. They didn’t ask them to stop. They didn’t tell them to stop. Nothing. They did laugh at their kids a few times. Oh and they pointed at them a fair bit. As if to say, 'that’s fun kids'.

Fun for them maybe, but not for anyone else on the ferry. There were lots of shuffling feet, eyes staring at the ground and glances between uncomfortable passengers.

& then this happened. This is the bit that I’ve been thinking about. It’s the part of the story that I question. I ask myself if I did the right thing. I could have just kept quiet. I could have said nothing and just got off the ferry in Manly with Picky and Pearl and headed home.  That would have been easy. But I can be a right gobby chap sometimes. 

Perhaps this time I shouldn't have been. But I was. I’ve been thinking about why I did what I did. But anyway, it doesn’t matter. I did it.

As we were making to get off the ferry, I turned to the two ladies and I said - nicely and calmly - but I admit it, I said it,

'Ladies, why are you letting your kids behave like that in public?'

That’s all I said. Honestly, that’s all. I freely admit that I said those exact words. No more. No less. Whoops.

It didn’t turn out well. I don't suppose it was ever going to turn out well. One of the ladies went ballistic. At me. I suppose the good thing was that her screaming at me drowned out the screaming of the two kids. But scream at me she did. It was clear where her daughter had inherited her ability to scream from; her mum.

I also freely admit that I have no idea what kind of day the two mums were having. I have no context to place the situation in, no history. I only know what I saw. And that was two parents of two kids allowing them to ruin a beautiful ferry journey for a whole bunch of people who didn’t deserve to have their ferry journey ruined. They didn’t once ask their kids to stop screaming, or try to distract them ... or anything. They just let them scream their heads off on a ferry. Inside the ferry. I think that’s what annoyed me the most. They could at least have tried to do something to stop the screaming.

I think as parents we owe it to others to do our best to make sure our kids don’t disrupt, destroy, run wild, run amok or cause havoc. Of course, all of these things will happen from time to time. That’s OK as long as the parents have at least tried to do something to prevent it. Surely we have to 'at least try'.

I’m a parent myself and I don’t think it’s acceptable to ‘just do nothing’. Doing nothing tells your kid that it’s perfectly OK to scream at the top of his or her voice for 20 minutes in a public place ... just for fun.  

Now you can see why I was agonising about posting this. I’ve gone and broken The Golden Rule. Parents stick together. They don’t question other parents. Not in public. Not with non-parents around. It’s us against them. 

Except it’s not. Sometimes even parents can be a real nightmare.

pip pip


Ps ... so what happened? how did it end? did the parents all end up as friends and go for a drink together in a child-friendly bar on Manly Wharf. Alas no, she screamed at me for a few seconds. It was all a little incomprehensible really. The gist was that the kids were tired, they had been out all day in the city and how dare I question their parenting skills. I was holding Pearl and so I decided to hold my tongue too. 


Picky, Pearl and I stopped at Chat Thai on Manly Wharf to grab takeaway. The 'ladies with the screamers' were met off the ferry by their husbands. They were a pair of big blokes. I could see them all looking around. Scanning the wharf. Were they looking for me? Seeking me out? I have no idea. I was hiding behind the counter in a Thai takeaway.


(photos from panaramio.com & sayhellostephanie.com)