I was leaving the park with my daughter yesterday when I noticed something peculiar. A little boy was wandering out of the open gate to the parking lot. All by himself.
For a split second I wondered if I should do anything about this, and then I spent the next split second pondering how I even could have considered not doing anything while I yelled out “Hey! Who lost their little boy!”
Some other concerned parents (not of the boy, either) instantly followed me out as we watched the little boy open the door and climb into the driver’s seat of a nearby parked car. We got to the boy and questioned him. He was alone in the car, with no parents to be found.
Then, out of the blue, the child’s mother emerged from the labyrinthine structure of slides and ladders, another child in arm. And in her other hand?
Why a cell phone, of course. What else?
She played it off as if she was leaving anyway, as though she had sent her child ahead to get in the car and wait for her and her other son. I don’t know, this is Florida. Maybe she wanted him to fire up the air conditioning, get the engine warmed up and get the radio going while she finished up some important business on the phone.
Or how about the truth, which really isn’t very hard to ascertain: she was too busy talking about nonsense on the phone when she should have been keeping at least one eye on her child. I would also expect this type of parent to lay the blame on whoever left the gate open.
See, I’ve become kind of an expert on this type of parent since the day I started taking my daughter to the park a while back. More so, I’ve become an expert on their children. They are the ones who follow my daughter too closely down the slide, push her out of the way without a word, and expect me to push them on the swings (Nope, not my job. Yours.)
Whenever she is treated disrespectfully like this, my ears perk up and I optimistically listen for some disciplinary remark from a nearby parent. After hearing nothing, I’ll look around and 4 out of 5 times see the same thing: parent; bench; cell phone. I won’t reprimand their child, but I will certainly do everything in my power to see to it that they don’t hurt my child (and obviously be sure that the misbehaving child doesn’t get hurt, either.)
This is just me, though. Obviously I couldn’t do anything about any child if I was off under the pavilion chatting it up on the phone.
Which brings us back to the perpetrator in question. What if no one saw her boy leave the park. From here on the “what ifs” only multiply and become more and more scary. What if he wandered into the street? What if he climbed into some else’s car? What if the wrong person was in that car? Every parent should shudder at this point.
Does all this make me a hero? Most definitely not. I’m just a parent. Besides, this time everyone was safe. I know that the parent in question will be back on the phone just the same the next time. Some people never learn.
For those of us who can, though, please just remember one thing: if you can’t watch your children and talk on the cell phone, please, just hang up your cell phone. Take care of what is really important.
