Woman Continues To Enjoy Her Ice Cream In Peace As Entitled Mother Yells Profanities At Her For Not Sharing The Treat With Crying Toddler
This mother is incredibly entitled. It is NOT the responsibility of a stranger to hand your kid her ice cream she just bought.
Parenthood does NOT make people more godly, loving, ethical, nor does parenthood make culture “better,” as so many hyper-Nuclear Family conservatives continue to argue. (I am a conservative as well, but I recognize the obnoxiousness and wrongness of so many “pro parenthood” type comments I see from “hyper pro Nuclear Family” conservatives).
The mother in this example sounds like a pathological narcissist. If someone has a terrible personality style while single and childless, they will continue to have a terrible personality after they marry and become a parent.
Excerpts:
AITA for relishing my ice-cream in front of a crying toddler?
I (25F) had to travel to a city 6 hours away for college related work. The trip was pretty tight. I had to leave on Thursday night by train and reached the city on Friday early morning, was engaged in work till the evening and then take a train to get back home on friday night itself.
When I got into the train at about 10 PM, I still hadn’t had dinner.
I was exhausted. I happened to share my cabin in the train with a middle aged woman and her toddler.
There was around 30 mins left for the train to start so I went out of the train, quickly got some snacks and ice-cream and got back to the cabin. I decided to have the ice-cream first because I didn’t want it to melt. The toddler saw it and starting asking for it.
I just looked at the mom and she goes “give it to my son and buy yourself a new one”.
I was taken aback because she wasn’t even requesting, she was demanding.
I was wayyy too exhausted to take any crap from anyone (old or young). I continued having the ice cream and told the woman “the shop is right there and they have all flavours”. The toddler starts crying loudly and I plugged in headphones.
The mom started yelling at me and said things like “you’re a brat”, “you’re heartless for doing this to a child”, “you’re trying to make me miss the train” and other things I couldn’t hear because I put the music in full volume.
I did not feel guilty about finishing the ice-cream in front of a crying toddler because I was really pissed at the moment.
NGL, I felt bad for the kid sometime later and thought of offering him some chips but I didn’t want to engage in any form of conversation with the mom. The remainder of the journey was in utter silence.
I told my boyfriend about this after I came back home and he thinks it’s hilarious but my mom was not happy about this.
She was more shocked than angry because I have always been great with kids and she couldn’t believe that I would do that to a kid even if the mom was annoying. My mom guilt tripped me so much that my “hangry” state got the best of me.
…Dr. Linda Rubinowitz, a marriage and family therapist at The Family Institute at Northwestern University, argues that the worst thing a parent can do when their child is having a tantrum is to react as violently as the child by yelling or through acts of physical violence.
Tactics such as bribing, begging, and giving in aren’t great either. “If you give in, you are rewarding the tantrum and ensuring that it will happen again and again,” says Dr. Rubinowitz. Kids need to know that “no” means “no,” even if they are upset about it. However, it is important to make it clear that while their feelings are OK, hurting others or themselves is not.
So, getting back to this situation, one thing is for certain—parenting is hard. Although the mother may have been tired from wandering the city for the full day and didn’t want another thing to add to her plate, shoving her problems onto another in such a rude way was definitely uncalled for, and it’s good that the OP decided to ignore the berating comments, rather than lashing back.
This woman was NOT the asshole. The mother was the asshole. It is not another person’s responsibility to get your kid ice cream.
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