Gold star for good parenting!!

I'm not a parent and don't pretend to have any expertise or experience in dealing with small children in the home, pretty good at dealing with teenagers though!!

As a teacher, I have the blessing of having 10 weeks a year in holidays. The curse is that I share them with children and families who are also forced to take their holidays at this time. Through observing family excursions and dealings with parents, I've made a few decisions about how I want to be a parent.

I recently visited Canberra. I saw many examples of "bad parenting" and a few of good. At the Australian War Memorial, I was flabbergasted at the number of families dragging small children around the exhibits. Two questions for these parents:
a) Are the children old enough to understand and appreciate the exhibits? Is it appropriate to take children there?
b) Do your children have an attention span long enough to pay attention and not irritate other patrons?
On the most part, the answer was a resounding NO! I'm all for taking children on excursions and broadening their life experience, its how we learn, but it needs to be appropriate!
The same rule can be applied to the well meaning mother who had 3 children under 6 at the dawn service, talking during the minutes silence. Firstly, you need to prepare children for what is to come. A friend suggested to me that children are unpredictable. What was she supposed to do he asked? My reply, though harsh, was don't come.
These parents needed the same lecture as a man who took his seven year old to a war museum in Vietnam that contained human specimens resulting from Agent Orange exposure. No small children at war related events!!

Conversely, at the National Museum in Canberra there was a family of four. The two little girls were so engaged in a film about artifacts to be found in the museum that they called out,"Dress, mummy, dress!" each time a frock was on the screen. Their parents quietly shushed them, but then talked to them about the things they saw at the end. Dignified, well done. And the kids weren't irritating at all!

I find that all this tends to go unspoken about. I have seen people I truly admire as they deftly calm their small children and weave them through public places with little mishaps, never once losing it. I think they should know. I'm now going to carry gold star stickers, hand them out to people I want to emulate.