When you find a child annoying is it more often the parent's fault or the child's?

I completely agree with you. My niece and nephew are polite and well-behaved and it makes me nuts when other parent’s don’t bother to teach manners to their kids!

Children are just being children. It is the job of parents to guide them.

Parents, parents, parents!! Annoying kid = annoying parents!

Sometimes, of course, it is about the parents. So many parents these days are far more worried about the idea that their children like them than about raising good citizens. However, to be fair, some kids are just that way, despite the parents’ best efforts, and all kids are really awful in public sometimes, even the best ones…

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, or plant a potato, get a potato.

By the way, I just want to point out that this is a modded question…it started out with “Have you ever noticed that other people’s children suck”?

Strangely I am guilty of a bit of a double standard on the matter. When it comes to random youtube videos: like this kid who’s not horrible, but not deserving of his own youtube video. (Surely another kid in that choir can sing better than him)

Meanwhile the song that suck-kid just performed was also performed by my favorite class in the whole wide world. It wasn’t great but just because THEY did it, I love it-and really like this song now just because of the one’s I like doing it.

I don’t want to be a jerk, but I might be.

It’s a blend. I have 3 grown kids. My oldest was always well behaved and eager to please. The other two were very good at impressing people in public until they hit adolescence, got a mind of their own and became little shits for a while. The middle kid has become an amazing adult, and although the baby can still turn on the charm, he still has his little shit moments.
I was a pretty good mom and always set boundaries. Some kids are just more stubborn about testing them than others.
Them there’s the parents who don’t pay attention to their kids and those poor kids have no idea where the boundaries are. They’ve never been told.
There ard no absolutes.

Anyone who calls their own child a “little shit” needs some lurve.

At the time they WERE little shits. My son broke his hand on another kids head in Sunday school ON MY BIRTHDAY!
He’s 26 now, and we now know he’s bipolar.(The rest of the family knows, he has decided that he’s not although he did so much better when he was medicated.)

@judi I know. Their mom seems cool enough so I assume they turned out okay! ;)

Kids are supposed to be little shits. It’s their job in life. If they don’t push the envelope they’re not trying.

Some push harder than others. I always said I raised my kids to think for themselves and question authority. It made for a dificult adolescence, but it made some pretty amazing adults.

@Judi : Yeah, that old conundrum…“Question Authority. But not mine!!!”

The parents. At work this little shit was taking all of the shoes off the racks and just throwing them down, and the mother wasn’t even telling him no…..she was too busy looking for shoes to try on. That happens more than it should: people letting their kids run wild in the mall ruining displays and such.

As a rule, it’s back on the parents….but, there are exceptions to the rule. Some children are just bad. You see this in large families especially.

That’s rather broad. What’s the definition of annoying? If annoying to you is a crying two year old, you’ve obviously never been around any child ever.

Actually, I don’t think it’s that simple – half the time it’s you.

I’m going to go with the oompa loompa’s on this one. They know best.

Parents

Children react to what they hear and see in their home. this good or bad behavior is taken right out of their home and into the classroom.

A good example is profanity used in a childs home. a child will repeat everything it hears, sees, smells or feels. their home is a proving ground for what they will take out into the social world.

The parents are at-fault 98% of the time.

Under the age of 11, I put it back on the parents. After that, well, like Shiney Shoes said, they can become little shits with total minds of their own, totally disregarding their entire upbringing.

When kids are not taught proper manners and respect of other people, they suck! And it gets worse the older they get. I think some parents just don’t know any better (they should not have had kids in the first place) some parents are just over-whelmed and give up (because they were never taught how to “parent”) and some parents just don’t give a damn (too selfish to care).

I have noticed that children generally fall into great at home/hell for others, or hell at home/great for others. A very small percentage are either hell/hell or great/great. Our day care director pointed out that everyone needs a place to let their hair down, be in a bad mood, act out negative emotions. If your parents don’t allow you to do this at home, then you tend to do it in a space where you are more likely to escape punishment, which is the world at large.

@BarnacleBill Just curious…do you have kids?

It really makes me mad when people just assume that childrens bad behavior is the parents fault. Sometimes undiagnosed mental illness is involved. I knew I was being judged when my son acted out and I also knew that I was twice the parent that most of those people who were judging me were.
Before I had kids I was one of those who said, “My kids will never…....”
I didn’t choose the children I was blessed with, but I know that I am a better, more humble person because of them. They were challenging and if anyone else had been their parent they might be in prison or dead right now.
I guess I’m trying to say, don’t judge until you’ve walked in the other persons shoes.

The only real experts on child rearing are those who have never had children.

As a friend of mine used to say: “It’s easy to be a great parent when you don’t have any children.”

Mine was a very eay child to raise, all the way through, and there were still those moments when, for whatever reason, she’d detonate in public. I almost worry more about the ones that never have those moments.

I remember my daughter having her first and only public temper tantrum. She was two, and got bent out of shape over something, and threw her self on the floor in the middle of the store and started wailing. Her dad and I looked at her in amazement, then we glanced at each other, and without a word between us we both stepped out of her sight around the corner! We peeked around to see her reaction…when she realized she had no audience she sat up, looked around again, then stood up and literally shrugged her shoulders like, “Well, THAT was a total waste of time!” It never happened again. :)

@Dutchess_III Great story! I was thinking about your no children statement. I don’t have any. The few times I have encountered a situation where there was anything annoying it’s almost always because of the parent’s actions or reactions. They either ignore the child, were mean to the child, or did something to make the situation worse. All the times they’ve tried to find out what was wrong with the child, quiet the child, or take them some where else, I wasn’t annoyed. They’re children after all, so I cut them some slack.

@Adirondackwannabe I hear you! It’s so annoying to hear a parent screeching, “Tommy! Stop that! How many times do I have to tell you! Stop that!” over and over and over….

When the kids are young it is definitely the fault of the parents. But, the older the kids are the more likely it is that it’s just their personality.

I think parents have the biggest slice of the pie. My own parents had this idea kids should be miniature adults and for some reason other adults would be more than patient and interested to be gabbed to about adult topics. I believe my parents thought other adults would be impressed but I personally always felt adults were annoyed and wanted me to go “play”.~

Younger children, generally I think it has more to do with the parental influence; or lack thereof. Teenagers, I’m sorry, at a certain point, it starts to be on them..with still a certain amount on the parents.

We know a family and adore their children, all teens now, but they can be obnoxious, at times. I’m not talking goofy, I’m talking spoiled brats. They know with me, I’ll call them on it, but their mother doesn’t always do the same. My husband and I just talked about it, I pointed out that if we were in the same shows as the teens, we’d try to get away with the same crap. Had either of us been raised that way, I mean. However, one is 18. That child/young adult, needs to understand that now is the time to really start accepting more responsibility for their actions.

@Dutchess_III, yes, I have two. When they were younger, we left more places that I can remember because the situation was probably not optimal for their age. That’s not to say we didn’t take them places. I preferred to have them act up at home; to have someone else correct their behavior in public or to have a teacher say something about the way they acted carried “consequences.” I’m not sure exactly what those consequences would have been; I never had to follow through on that statement. Manners were also taught and expected as part of family behavior.

I have gone to bat for them with school and other adults; my daughter was suspended for cutting a pep rally to sit in the library and work on a reading assignment for a college class she was taking (She took the suspension, but I had a lengthy discussion with the principal and disciplinarian about why I didn’t think the punishment fit the circumstances.) And I have had to tell people to keep their opinions to themselves when commenting on my younger daughters’ excessive thinness and extreme hairstyles and colors. Underneath that hot pink mohawk is the only registered Republican voter in our family. Ever.

From a very young age, we worked really hard on correctly identifying emotions so they could be discussed. My younger daughter had some things that happened to her that caused her to shut down.

Other people seemed to like them. There were days when they pushed me to the edge.

Misbehavior is generally the fault of ill trained parents. It can also be exacerbated by an especially difficult to discipline (teach) child. Some children are born with a desire to obey their parents and they are easy to raise, others are born with a desire to follow their own path, no matter what the consequences. They are difficult to civilize.

Our attitude toward the child is the only thing we can control. If we choose to be annoyed, that is our decision, and we are responsible for the consequences of our own choice. If we choose to feel sympathy for the child and the parents, that would be an entirely different consequence.

The parents are to blame.

@Judi You are right that some children have mental disabilities and I feel nothing but sympathy for those parents, but I’m guessing that the other 9 out of 10 kids don’t have a mental disability. They have distracted, un-educated (with regards to child rearing) or selfish parents.

I hate it when I’m in a store and I see some yuppie mother screeching, “Tyler, honey. Mommy’s counting. Tyler 1, 2. Tyler! Mommy’s counting. Tyler. I’m counting to 3 if you don’t put that down. Tyler, honey. 1. Tyler!” What mommy should have done is taken the item out of Tyler’s hand immediately and told him that if he didn’t calm down immediately, they would leave the store right away. Then leave.

I also hate it when I see some poor little tiny kid continuously asking for mommy, but mommy is too busy yakking on the cell phone and not paying any attention to her child. These are the kids that are likely to get abducted, lost or hit by a car.

And I hate it when I see little kids in a store or a playground or a theme park wander off by themselves because the parent is so engrossed in their own business (phone, conversation, computer) that they don’t notice that their kid has disappeared. This happened at a park once and I found this little 3 year old kid crying and walking around by himself. I went up to every parent on the playground to ask if this child was theirs. They all said no. Then those parents started to help me find the actual parents. Turned out that the parents were sitting far away on the grass having a little “party” and didn’t know or care that their child was missing. When the child was finally returned to them, they didn’t say thank you at all, didn’t seem concerned that the child had wandered away and could easily have been abducted. And they continued to party. This entire scenario lasted about a half an hour. During that time, I didn’t let the child out of my sight/custody. I was pretty close to calling the police. Luckily my relatives were watching my own kid while I was trying to track down the parents of this other child. And MY kid, and his cousins sat with the little boy and kept him occupied while we tried to locate his parents.

And last, but not least, I hate it when I see a parent slap or berate a little child in the store for simply asking mommy a question. I’ve heard parents yell, Shut the H*ll up!!!” at little tiny kids. All of these examples are simply bad parenting.

Wow…I’m watching my 5 year old grandson today while Mom works. I took him to my hair appointment. I didn’t realize it was going to take almost three hours! Well, the lady had some big leggos in there…and my grandson played quietly the entire time! You’d hear quiet engine noises, and “I’m flying” noises and “Oh, the building is falling down! Ahhhh!” —but all very quietly. And that’s it. An older guy came in and started talking to him, and he and Aden just chatted back and forth for five minutes. Then he left and Aden went back to playing. I was really, really astonished at his patience. Not one single time did he say anything about wanting to leave now, or being hungry (although he was when we went in!)...not a peep.
Yay for Mom! And..yay for HER Mom! That’s me :)