Harsh words for our kids

Before I was a parent, I'd hear moms and dads discipline their kids in public, and I'd recoil at the tone and vitriol:

"What did I just tell you?"

"Put it down."

"Don't make me come over there."

It all seemed so harsh, and I vowed that if I ever had a kid, I wouldn't speak so sharply.

Well, I'm a father now and let's just say that I've readjusted my view on the public scolding. These days, I'm more likely to wonder just what it is that junior did to get that father or mother so exorcised.

As a late-life dad, I think I'm much more patient than I would have been in my 20s. But a child can make even the Mother Teresa parents among us see matador-cape red. I have – on rare occasions – upbraided the Little Girl in a park or mall. Nothing with a Mommy Dearest bent. But a rather stern and directed talking-to, nonetheless.

These babies of ours are last-nerve plucking, sanity-trying, stamina-sucking creatures, from time to time. Basically lovely as all get out, of course. But still.

A father I know once went nuts in a shopping center after his kid wandered away. Now, that's the proverbial worst parental nightmare, and I cut the guy a long rope's worth of slack as I heard the tale of how the dad bawled out his 4-year-old boy when he found his son quickly afterward. But when the yelling was done, the father went a step further, ripping the kid's favorite doll from his hands and throwing it in the trash.

"That's how it made me feel when you did that," he said as he dragged the now-hysterical child away.

I sat and pondered when I heard this story. Would I have done that? Am I capable of tearing away a beloved toy to re-create for the child the depth of my pounding fear?

The Little Girl tested me not long ago, purposely running from me in a mall.  She didn't get four feet before I caught up with her.

She laughed and I yelled, then she cried and I comforted. "You can't do that," I said, over and over as I held her. I thought about that other father's punishment, the extra step of taking away from her something dear and needed.

I couldn't go there. I didn't want to.

Is that weak or wise? There's no field manual for this. It's hard for all of us.

Now when I see a yelling dad, I still cringe a bit. But I try not to be such a knee-jerk reactor. And I force myself to judge slowly. Or not at all.