1. User knows exactly what he wants.
2. User can only express that in his own language.
3. Data flow diagrams, best practices, structured design, etc.
4. Dev still doesn't know what user wants but builds anyway.
5. 2 years later, project scrapped.
Scott Nesin:
1. User knows exactly what he wants.
2. User can only express that in his own language.
3. Developer patiently encourages user to express himself.
4. Eureka!
5. Much learned; happy ending.
It is a rare developer who can handle the Nesin step 3. It requires an empathy that doesn't come naturally to many engineers. However, when cultivated, that empathy makes for phenomenal developers. When I manage development teams, that is the number one trait I manage for. With empathy, all other problems can be solved.
[empathy] is the number one trait I manage for. With empathy, all other problems can be solved
You win. I've stumbled across a handy mental model (in which empathy plays a pivotal role) through research on mindfulness, emotion, and neuroscience, as well as in an emotional intelligence course taught at Google by Chade-Meng Tan. In short:
It turns out that your brain uses the same machinery to model your own emotional state as that which it uses to model the emotional states of others, so the better you are at identifying your own emotional states, the better you will be at identifying them in others, which will allow you to communicate more effectively and so forth.
Feeling potential for a new buzzword-methodology in this. It's common sense, but not so common that you can't charge for workshops/talks/certifications.
The only thing you need now is a good, substantial name that evokes a mechanical and engineering process, like "User Language Oriented Design".
Our local supermarket is a great primarily organic shop. They have carts made for the little ones and we normally use that to do all our shopping.
I usually let him pick things down from the shelves or give him things from them to put into his cart. Sometimes his picks are random but mostly he fetches three things that I normally get.
1. Milk
2. Pasta
3. Swarts Broot
After that we go to the counter and he fetches the things for me to put up on the desk. He now even packs it.
I have found that involving him like this makes it much easier to set boundaries because he can relate to them.
It's quite different to be told to put only some of the things back rather than everything.
It's quite amazing to experience the emergence of consciousness.
This story has a great moral, and from a younger-person's standpoint, I think it's something every parent should consider: enable, and don't obligate.
Encouragement itself is a dangerous path, since it can lead to an unhealthy zeal and interest. Unless you're parenting in an unique way, parents usually are seen as an authority figure by the kids. Because of this, over-encouragement could be seen as forcefulness, and act to discourage the child by creating a sense of obligation. This is exactly what happened to me on multiple occasions. I swam breast stroke competitively when I was younger, and stopped training completely when my coach and my parents decided I should train for higher level competition. I also played badminton on a provincial level, and basically the same thing happened. This isn't me being lazy. I trained 9 hours a day last summer at the Shaolin temple on my own will.
On the other end, everything I've built (or done, other sports included), I've done so on my own accord, either with no support from my parents, or just a slight tinge of interest. I guess every child is different - just make sure not to make them feel obligated.
I also see this as an aversion to being manipulated. People (kids, adults) definitely react in different ways to this, it's why you have to be careful about generalized advice. Some kids would flourish being "pushed" into something, others experience an almost allergic reaction to seemingly blunt manipulation and obligation. The exact way parents and coaches reward and encourage the kid also matters, and matters differently to every kid. You just have to figure out what each kid is like.
it's why you have to be careful about generalized advice
This is so true. There is no generalized advice that will work for all parent/children combinations. Every child is different and will require different inputs to affect optimal outputs.
Having said that, I will give one piece of generalized advice: know your kids. Notice my advice is on how a parent should behave, not the child. :) Really spend time with your kid(s) and learn how they tick. Only by doing that can you hope to understand how to help them achieve their potential.
He builds pretty amazing stuff like indoor trampoline [0] and a robotic spider [1]. Due to his increasing popularity and requests to learn from him, he created the adventure builders club: http://jamius.com/abc/abc.html
- I think the people at our Home Depot would not have been as irritated and would have led the way to the paint department, maybe it's regionally different
- My girls go for spray paint 10 out of 10 times
My daughter had a 4th grade "invention convention" project and she chose to build a anti-kick board for her desk so the boy sitting opposite couldn't kick her. It also had comfy footrests. The boy's side had an Italian and her side had a German flag (the respective nationalities) spray-painted. It ended up looking really nice and the teacher let her keep it on her desk for a few days. That project encouraged her to build some tables for her room.
This sort of story makes me sad. We don't have a tree house, we don't even have a tree. We don't have money to spend at the DIY store to keep the house in shape never mind making checkers boards for fun. I thought I was getting pretty good at quenching the covetousness that society seemed to have imbued me with but when one realises that stuff is needed for many uplifting experiences.
Realising the great joy certain things brought me as a kid and realising that those things are beyond the reach of my kids ... Gah.
A happy story made me sad; I'm too easily depressed.
I made a 'Ponyo' boat out of a used soda can (which I took from the office), a used milk/juice carton (which I took for a party I went to). Didn't cost anything (even the glue I used was the end of a pot of epoxy I've had for years).
That looks really good ... going to need a hot-glue gun first. Actually though some multi-purpose tube glue that I use to stick my shoes with should do it. Still not free.
It's funny, so often with these makes there are hidden costs. Silver spray can is quite expensive where I am. Of course you can skip that part.
Nothing is free, but can be a negligible cost. You can make temporary paper glue out of flour and water, you can boil it down to use for paper mache. You can add food colouring to your water & flour mix to make paint.
Food colouring cost money, as does flours, but you can make your own from plants/cereals if you really feel the need.
Either you have enough money to buy some glue, or you can spend time teaching your kids how to make it. If your kids have an impressive enough attention span, you'll be teaching them something by making the glue, even more if you make the flour!
Money just makes things convient/easy. You're trying to teach, lack of money helps that.
>You can make temporary paper glue out of flour and water
Not useful for sealing submerged parts of a shiny metal structure though.
>Either you have enough money to buy some glue, or you can spend time teaching your kids how to make it.
This is how it seems to go. However practically you need grain, so you need a trip to a field with grain in, which would be a bus ride, which would cost more than walking to the shops to buy glue.
Once you're at the field (assuming you have permission), you'll need to gather the grain. Scythe? Sacks? I know from experience that you get little flour from the grain you can hand collect and grind with a couple of flat stones in a couple of hours. Were talking young kids here too, getting them to gather grain won't be much fun when they're moaning "I thought we were making junk boats ... can't we make our boats".
I'm not trying to be completely obstructive (honest!) - making our own epoxy sounds more fun (but again, hidden costs) - but perhaps these things will come later.
That is kind of what I meant by hidden costs.
To recapitulate often one doesn't realise the benefit of the resources one has available. Making a piece of furniture for example someone will say "use your drill press", "use a nail gun", "use an orbital sander", etc.: obviously once one has these things the usage cost is near zero but the acquisition cost is high. These acquisition costs get hidden.
You could use almost any glue for the non-engine parts. The hot glue is good because it's simple. Agree on the silver paint, it is expensive and totally unnecessary. I painted it because there was a can in the house that my SO had used for spraying pine cones to make Christmas decorations and I figure there was no point the last of it going to waste.
I'm a big believer in not throwing stuff away that could be potentially useful.
We don't have a tree house, or a tree, either. The lesson I've learned from having two boys on one grad student's stipend is that they would almost always play with an empty milk jug than some plastic toy from Kids'R'Us. We have a bunch of big old fancy plastic toys people gave us and the boys have spent a total of about 10 minutes looking at them. How long have they spent building towers from old cardboard boxes and knocking them down? I haven't counted, but it's a long time.
There's a hidden advantage to this: if you're wealthy it is harder to raise your children to be resourceful without money. Growing up, money was one resource I did not have much access to; instead, many of my toys were self-built, my projects often involved making money, and my motivation sprung from necessity. I really couldn't have asked for a better education as an engineer/entrepreneur.
While money makes things a lot easier my kids make most of their things from the boxes, paper packaging, old clothes and wrapping paper that we stash away. We bulk buy PVA glue for them to use from DIY stores so it really costs very little for them to experiment/play.
There's got to be a surplus/junk store like http://sciplus.com in your area (that one's got locations in Chicago and Milwaukee). Boatloads of cheap arts and crafts materials: cotton balls, tissue paper, glue sticks, chalk, markers, etc. I spent $30 there and got about four shoeboxes full of random crap for my nieces to craft with.
Dollar stores are great for this stuff. And office supply stores can be especially nice during back-to-school sales. And wander down every aisle in the drugstore - wooden spoons! Cupcake liners! Ping-pong balls!
I've never seen a place like SciPlus in your link.
However, can I drag you back to my initial bleatings - the point being that it is a rich persons gift to their child to allow them free rein in such a hardware project.
Yes we have lots of craft materials that we've acquired over the years, no we don't have $30 to spend on "random crap". But this precious little to do with where we started ...
We're pretty creative when it comes to craft. Yes we reuse what packaging and what-have-you that we can but this isn't at all the same experience as a kid thinking "hmm I'd like to make a checker board" and then being free to go out and buy the materials and make it with their dad.
Lets be honest, you can only make so much out of plastic drinks cartons and cardboard packaging. Even then it's like, oh we need some clamps, a decent trimming tool, etc..
Don't worry I'm just exhausted with "making do" at the moment. At the risk of broadcasting a break down I think I'd better slip away quietly ...
You can get cheap (essentially free) and perfectly good wood from recycling centers and such places. You don't need a tree to make a fort. I had a tree fort, but I honestly think the most important part is the fort. Even if it's only four feet tall and sitting on the ground, it will still be boat-loads of fun.
You don't need a large amount of resources & cash to follow this style of parenting/teaching. The main point is spending the time, listening & follow your child's lead.
Too often as adults we take over, we are too quick to step in, solve problems, "help" & rescue. Playing dumb can be the smartest thing to do sometimes.
Awesome story. Been taking the same approach with my daughter. She's now 10 and is pretty fearless about wielding any tool or material needed to design whatever she's working on.
Reminds me of a story I once saw about Tinkering School for kids, where they let the kids conceive and builds project together. http://www.tinkeringschool.com/
My son (5) has his own workbench next to mine, and regularly likes to go "build stuff" with me. He's built several "houses" (random blocks of wood glued/screwed/nailed together) on his own, and loves helping cut/drill/nail whatever project we happen to be working on. If I'm working on electronics stuff he likes to take the voltmeter and check the resistance of various objects to see if it beeps.
I realized all the hands-on/building/tools/etc was really paying off when he changed the batteries in a baby bouncer completely by himself. (For those unfamiliar with anything baby related, this means he had to work a screwdriver and remove several screws to take the cover off just to get to the batteries - I know adults who can't really work a screwdriver.) He even had the appropriate remark of frustration when at the end of it all he realized he'd put the cover back in the wrong way and had to take the whole thing off and re-do it...
I don't have kids yet but when I think about parenting, this is what I always dream of. However, when I tell my "non-hacker" friends, they don't seem to get excited about it. I don't know why. For me, parenting is all about playing a supporting role in the kids journey to understand the world and learn to hack it for the better.
Awesome story, and a great lesson to all out there (current parents or otherwise)–kids know a lot more than many initially think.
Like this guy letting his kid run the show in the store, my parents gave me freedom with computers (old Macs that some schools were throwing out) when I was growing up, knowing that they could fix whatever it is I might happen to break, and that's given me the confidence throughout my childhood and up to the present day to always experiment and try new project ideas, knowing that mistakes can be fixed.
Given his parent's awesomeness, I'm sure Guy has seen similar benefits with having had the freedom to make project choices typically restricted to adults.
Slightly off-topic but most Home Depot's on the first saturday of each month hold a free kids workshop. They provide everything necessary to build something (spice rack, shelves etc). My son and I have attended many and their great.
My experience with my parents was quite the opposite. Whenever I would ask for help they'd present me with a heap of arguments why I shouldn't "waste my time on this stuff" and even try to stop me. I finally came to the conclusion that it's best not to ask them at all but try to do it secretly myself and only show them the end result.
The only other possible outcome was them doing it all themselves. Usually saying that they will do it faster and better and won't break or make anything dirty in process. Perfect example of how not to raise children.
This really brightened up my morning. A great story and surprisingly, a good twist. Much like his Dad, I had no idea what Guy was up to until the end. It really shows you how tuned in kids are. For any parent, this is a great lesson: let your kids lead the way. They may seems a bit crazy, but this is evidence that usually, they're not. Hands down, though, my favorite part of this whole story was imagining Guy running up to Home Depot employees by himself to ask for help. Adorable.
As the proud parent of a very chatty daughter of two, I wonder: what would be an equivalent sort of project for girls?
At the moment she likes Duplo/Lego because it's one of the few areas where we connect over the gender divide, but her other roleplay and games are all about caring and she's very empathic with other children (worrying when they cry etc). I do wonder whether pointing her towards hackerdom would really be the right thing to do.
The thing is that kids in general tend to be pushed into stereotypes. This isn't just an unsubstantiated hypothesis I actually remember how adults used do this, for example they don't play with you if you pick up the wrong kind of doll, they don't look at you properly and so on. It's just subtle cues but a child picks them. (every child depends on these cues to learn and develop)
What worries me is that if you continue treating everything with the "over the gender divide" attitude she will get attuned to it, and it will kick off a pretty vicious cycle. So, please do realise that labels are for jars and just let her be, like this awesome dad did for his son.
I think the moral of this story is that it's not your business. She will decide what she want to do, and her parents should help, and not restrain her, or tell her what to do.
There are infinite possibilities for doing things in the world. If not building things, what about the kid who held a speech in front of the UN at age eleven and apparently moved lots of people to tears (don't remember - was it on HN recently?).
You could do some biology stuff, like EO Wilson who went on the trail of fire ants. Some biological drama is probably playing out right now in your backyard.
What I mean is: whatever interests your daughter, there is probably something useful/fun to do.
Guy's checkers table was no more a "project for boys" than a project for your daughter (or, better yet, by your daughter) would be a "project for girls". The thing I took away from the OP was to support your children in whatever they do, regardless of whether they want to have tea parties with their friends or climb trees or hack the NSA.
My son keeps asking me about how to "hack computers" and I'm pretty sure that's what he's on about. I keep telling him about how to program. Eventually I hope it will click.
Even before programming, general IT knowledge seems to be very useful for hacking. Operating systems, hardware, and networking are great topics (and they are more concrete than most programming).
The 10-yr-old son of a friend of mine got into programming after asking me how to set up a game server. Introduced him to basic networking via the router config, explained how the internet worked and from there he got interested in how games are made. I think we all have our own stories about what compelled us to dig deeper.
I was brought up by an awesome dad like the one in the story in many ways, he just exposed me to everything that he was interested in. We had computer guts all over the floor, the garage was full of electronic parts he was fooling around with. No 2nd-hand television lasted that long in our house. A really strong memory for me as a young child was just hanging out with dad making/breaking things, and my dad not in any way playing favourite over me and my big brother (though I was only allowed to watch when they were putting computers together). I am positive that just this exposure gave me the impetus to follow my inclination into the world of making stuff as soon as I became dexterous enough to do so (whether it was anything I found interesting in a 'make stuff' book, treehouse expansions, modding my bike, breaking electronics). I think of it as having the 'scare' taken out of me - just being exposed to a technical workshop from birth meant that I didn't have to make that leap from 'I want to make stuff' to 'how do I make stuff' because my dad and brother had shown me that you just, well, make stuff and figure it out as you go. Now my nephews have the same life - I'm so proud of my 4yr old nephew when I ask him for a specific wrench size or anything from the workshop. Just through exposure he's learnt what all the tools are and what they are for. If he wants to grow up and be a hacker, that's great but whatever he chooses to do in life he'll always know that if something breaks he can try and fix it, or (hopefully) break it himself for his own needs. If your daughter is interested in being a hacker she'll let you know.
I've got two daughters 9 and 11 and so far they've built projects just like the one in the article (although our stuff ends up looking a bit less refined at the end).
It seems like our girls turned less "girly" once they started school and of course it helps both my wife and I are engineers. Pink spray paint is always an option...
What a wonderful lesson given by Scott and Guy. Mapping Scott and his young kid as Team leader and a developer respectively,we could figure out how a Team lead/Someone from Management, could encourage his developers to try out new things anda set their minds free by giving them freedom to do something which they love. It's kind of Google's 20% time rule.
Every Org which trust his non-managerial staff and allow them to try out things often progress and prosper much faster than companies where politics and bureaucracy often create obstacles.
Based on your corporate access policies, this web site ( http://gamesbyemail.com/WoodTape/Default.htm ) has been blocked because it has been determined by Web Reputation Filters to be a security threat to your computer or the corporate network. This web site has been associated with malware/spyware.
Threat Type: Othermalware
Threat Reason: IP address is either verified as a bot or has misconfigured DNS.
It already happened that Cisco IronPort has blocked legitimate sites, like www.rp-photonics.com, and from the
service desk reply I got it appeared that this was not the only case. Of course one gets used to go around the blocks with proxies, but I don't see the point in blocking stuff in the first place.
That writer's insistence on hanging back and not getting a little bit more involved in the project or at least helping out really annoyed me for some reason ... I had to skip to the end to find out what happened.
Parents who give their kids a regular diet of "High Praise", "Agreeableness", "Supportiveness" and "Positive Interaction", but don't send them to college create children who have higher socioeconomic statuses than children of disconnected parents who send theirs to college. Multiple studies done confirm this.
Adam Savage from Mythbusters claimed his love of building came from his parents encouraging him to make all sorts of crazy inventions. Moral of the story, encourage the children to build stuff, keep them on track but don't do it for them.
one of the nicest ideas I got from Adam Savage is the idea of a hardware store expense account. His father, instead of giving him an allowance, would give him a certain amount of money he could spend every week at the hardware store.
An artist who is a hero of mine, Toshi Iwai (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshio_Iwai) in his talks describes how his parents stopped buying toys for him when he turned 10. He was encouraged to design and build his own toys. When he talks about his art, he always starts by showing these great sketches and flipbooks he made as a ten year old.
anyway, I find this approach (expense account for building supplies, encouraging children to build their own toys) really quite inspiring and plan on trying to raise my children the same way when they are that age.
I'm not trying to be pedantic, but that is a book, not a study. I've seen multiple studies that show parents who withhold praise raise higher achievers (personally, I don't like that, but none the less - the studies do exist)
> I've seen multiple studies that show parents who withhold praise raise higher achievers
Ok. I don't like that either.
I'd rather raise a healthy, curious, creative, passionate, and happy child.
I couldn't care less about what he achieves.
If he achieves nothing, so be it. In fact, on average, he won't achieve much ... but when he does achieve something, it'll blow your mind.
And that little drone you raised, who is desperately trying to catch your attention? He'll focus on titles and milestones. He can verbalize that. He can quantify it. He can get others (and you) to easily recognize his "achievement" ... more to the point, he will always be trying to put you in a position where you MUST give him praise, because you constantly hold it back.
You want to know what that looks like? BA, BS, MS, Phd, JD, 100K salary, BMW, etc. etc. ... easily quantifiable status symbols that can be placed in a study and can be easily used to force the parent to render praise. Is that really achievement?
I think 'start the next Apple' is just as constrained as what you're dogging.
What about just getting married and raising a great family? Or starting a mechanic shop that lets him fish every afternoon? Living a happy life that they choose and having a positive impact on the people around them. The occupation, money, etc. don't matter so much.
> What about just getting married and raising a great family?
That's a lot harder than starting the next Apple. Seriously.
Telling your kid "I just want you to be happy" is nice, but it conveys nothing. As a parent, it's your job to teach him how to get there.
I should know what his passion is. I'm his dad. I don't care if it's computers, cars, or fish. Whatever it is, I'll do it with him and I'll push him to be the best in that field.
I don't care what "achievements" he acquires. That trophy means squat. So does that degree. So does that salary.
I want to see the child challenged, I want to see him fail, and I want to see him get up, learn from his mistakes, and try again. I want to see that attitude in every aspect of his life. That, alone, is the biggest achievement he can make.
Maybe if the kid tries to become the next Steve Jobs, he'll fall on his ass often enough, to the point that the pain will beat into him what's really important in life ... and maybe, just maybe, after all that, he'll learn how to live a happy life.
I've nailed a few of those. My girlfriend has claim on most of the others.
But, at the end of the day, our parents are most proud of us for who we are as human beings and members of society, and not for any titles, salaries or vehicles we possess. And I think that's exactly the way it should be.
I would much rather raise an intellectually curious child who would like to show me the cool project they worked on, or the cool thing they discovered, than one who believes I'll only praise them for a letter grade from an arbitrary third party.
> I'd rather my kid start the next Apple.
Me too, but I'd happily settle for my kid being happy, content and fulfilled with the life they lead, regardless of whether or not that involves creating a Fortune 500.
> he will always be trying to put you in a position where you MUST give him praise, because you constantly hold it back.
> ...easily quantifiable status symbols that can be placed in a study and can be easily used to force the parent to render praise.
Just as a data point, I'd like to add that coming from a childhood of constant praise and overprotective parenting, I am also looking for easily quantifiable symbols of achievement. Growing up under-challenged, for me it was quite the interesting psychological experience to have to face the reality that I've been coasting through high-school and college, and have absolutely no objective idea of my skills or achievements.
What I mean is, each extreme is damaging - lack of praise, but also too much praise. A good middle ground is perhaps objective evaluation of the child's progress, coupled with a good introduction into the art of reasonable persistence.
You can encourage without fawning praise. A combination of letting my kids fail, talking about how to remedy and encouragement to get them over the 'getting started again' hump is working out great for my two kids.
My achievement (rather than effort) was praised. I certainly wish it had been the other way around - I think that would have led to much better work habits, willingness to push through tedious/boring work, etc.
This guy thinks his kid is cute, because it's his kid, but I don't like the part where he deliberately irritates everyone in the hardware store. I don't think your kid is cute, so please keep it out of my way.
Speaking from personal experience, I think the positives of this outweigh the negatives. I've had many customer-interactive part-time jobs in my life, and I think that it can be great fun when adults have their children do the interacting. So long as the store is not too busy, and the parents provide intervention when it is necessary (as in this particular story), I think that most people will not be inconvenienced significantly.
More importantly, I think that forcing your kids to do these types of interactions from a young age is very instrumental in their growth and development. While I am not well-versed in childhood development, I think that I rarely (if ever) was encouraged to do these sorts of things on my own when I was young, and that (possibly due in part to this) I had to break an irrational phobia of these types of social interactions at around the age of 18.
I was literally afraid to ask for help in a store, or to call a business for almost any reason. Mentally preparing for phone calls with strangers, even something as innocuous as finding out store hours, could leave me shaking.
Fortunately, I've managed to overcome this anxiety. I can't know for certain whether more of these types of interaction at a young age would have prevented this problem, but I think that it is reasonable to believe that it could have. The slight inconvenience is a small price to pay for this sort of developmental skill-building.
That's not to say that some people don't need to reign in their kids now and then, just that an appropriate amount of interaction is healthy and really not very annoying at all to others.
Well, you've all downvoted the crap out of me because it's not socially acceptable to publicly admit that you find any aspect of children annoying. Step away from the knee-jerk reaction, and read the author's own words:
'The fellow is already engaged with another customer, talking on a phone and looking at various plumbing boxes on the top shelf. [...] He is rather busy, and is starting to look around frantically for a parent to clear the matter up. "Tough luck, buddy," I think as I'm stepping forward.'
The part I object to is not teaching a child how to socialize. It's the deliberate abuse of a "busy", "engaged with another customer", and "frantic" employee under the banner of "tough luck, buddy" -- i.e. "it's a kid, so I can do whatever obnoxious thing I want and you have to put up with it". Also, "tough luck, other customer". Maybe this kid also needs to learn how to wait his turn, so he doesn't wind up a self-entitled asshole like his daddy.
Immediately afterward, though, the parent does step in and help out - a small amount. It sounds to me like the parent here is trying to subtly remind the employee that this is a learning experience for Guy. The entire exchange seems, in my mind, to take no more than 30 seconds away from the busy customer service representative, which is about 20 more seconds than it would have taken for the parent to ask in the first place.
There are, of course, some things wrong here. The child should not interrupt another customer to get help - that is rude. But part of learning is making mistakes, and I think it totally agrees with the spirit of the rest of the story to let the child make the mistake, and point out afterwards what improvements could be made (to be clear, the story does not say that this happens, I am only suggesting the hypothetical that it could happen, and I claim that it would justify the inconvenience). Again, this is slightly inconvenient for the people involved, but a great life lesson for the kid. By making these social mistakes, he gains experience with the types of subtle cues people let on when you are performing a social faux pas. A short explanation after the fact from the father can help the child not to make the same mistakes again.
Of course, this particular father may have done none of those things. He may be a sadistic bastard who pointed out the most busy, overly worked employee in the store simply because he likes bothering people, then congratulated his kid on making a spectacle. But the spirit of the story is lighthearted, so I interpret his actions as well-meaning (and probably slightly exaggerated, for effect).
I don't think that people should have to put up with any obnoxious thing a kid does. In fact, I think it would have been a great thing for the other people in the story to treat him like an adult, just like the dad wanted them to. If the clerk had said "hang on, I'll be able to help you in one minute", that wouldn't have been a problem. Or if the other customer had said, "pardon me, but I am in the middle of a question here - can you wait?", then the obnoxiousness of the situation could have been avoided entirely and the kid would have gotten a great lesson out of it.
People just need to relax. I know kids can be obnoxious. It bothers me to hell when I see children running around, bumping into people and sword-fighting in the aisles of the supermarket while the parent seems totally oblivious. But these sort of minor inconveniences need to be viewed as they are - minor. Total time wasted of other people in the store on this day - maybe about 45 seconds. Hardly a big enough deal for you to label the daddy a "self-entitled asshole".
By the way, I didn't down-vote you. I don't agree with you, but I think that you made a perfectly valid point - children are annoying. In fact, I up-voted you for it.
I upvoted your comment because I think it's an important point, but I wanted to note something that I found bothersome: "people like you" is a rather broad brush to use when judging someone from a single comment. Perhaps less harsh would be "people who share this sentiment," as the original poster may be in every other way a decent person.
