Kind words can make big difference for stressed parents at Christmas

By David McElroy · December 21, 2015

As I pulled into a parking place at Walmart Monday evening, I could hear crying and screaming. A woman and her two children were at the van next to me. The youngest child was crying at the top of her lungs. The other child was yelling. The mom was screaming back.

I immediately didn’t like her.

“Get in the car and stop screaming,” she screamed at one child. “No, you’re not getting that. Just get in there and shut up, both of you.”

I sat in my car for a moment, silently judging her for being out of control and screaming at her kids.

As I got out of the car and looked over at the woman, I saw someone who looked exhausted, angry and stressed. She didn’t seem like a bad person. She just seemed like someone who was overwhelmed and snapped at her children because she had reached the end of her rope.

There’s a part of me that has a whole bundle of pre-made judgments for someone in such a situation. Her children are out of control because she hasn’t taught them how to behave. She should know better than to yell at them like that. She should act like the adult. She should be in control.

The list goes on and on.

I don’t know where my list comes from. I’ve discovered a lot of people have similar lists. We have ways that parents ought to act and children ought to act. When we see them in a moment such as this — overwhelmed and out of control — the human judgment reaction can easily kick in.

And as I stood by the side of my car with my door open — observing this family at a moment which wasn’t one of its best — I suddenly realized I was wrong.

Yes, the children seemed like out-of-control brats at the moment. Yes, the mom seemed like an out-of-control adult who was reacting poorly to whatever had been going on. But the truth is that I didn’t know what was going on with them.

I was wrong to judge them.

As soon as I changed my attitude, I closed and locked my door. I saw that the woman was almost finished unloading her grocery cart, so I offered to take it for her after she was finished.

She looked up in gratitude and smiled at me.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m having a really bad day.”

“Was it really crazy inside Walmart?” I asked, gesturing to the busy store.

“Yes, but it’s not really that,” she said. “My kids are hungry and tired. They’re anxious for Christmas to get here. I had a bad day at work. And my oldest just had a meltdown inside and I was embarrassed. I’m just tired.”

She was saying the words to me, but she almost wasn’t aware that I was even there. She just needed to say it.

“I’m sorry it’s been such a bad day,” I said. “We all have days like that.”

“I don’t feel like a good mother today,” she said. “I promised myself I’d never be the mom who yells at kids in public. I just lost it.”

“I don’t have children yet,” I said, “but I’m sure I’ll make my own mistakes then, even though I swear I never will. At least you know what you don’t want. The fact you feel bad about whatever happened tells me you care. It’s going to be OK.”

She smiled. She had just taken the last items out of the grocery cart. She thanked me for taking the cart back for her.

“Thanks for listening for a minute,” she said. “I didn’t mean to say that to you, but I needed to vent to an adult for a minute.”

I took the cart and headed toward the store. She got into the van to head home with her children.

It’s easy to judge. I do it all too easily. Maybe you do, too. I don’t know.

What I do know is that there are people everywhere who need a kind word and a listening ear. There are a lot of stressed and overwhelmed parents right now, just four days before Christmas. It’s easy to be stressed anytime — and you don’t have to be a parent to lose control — but the time before a holiday can be especially stressful.

If you see an overwhelmed mom or dad, try not to have the judgmental reaction I had. Try to lend an encouraging word or at least a listening ear. Most of them are decent people who you’re seeing at their worst.

Maybe you can be the kind voice they need in such moments of stress. It’s worth a try.

Share on Social Networks

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

Related Posts