“I don’t like this,” I found myself whispering across the table to my best friend as we sat across from each other at breakfast on Sunday. As many students from our college do, we’d taken our work to one of the local restaurants; it was quiet, and we were sitting in a corner booth with our laptops. We’d been there for about an hour when a man came in with his young son. As soon as they sat down, I found my focus shifting from my work to their conversations. The man’s voice was loud, but that isn’t what drew my attention. What caused me to set my work aside was the way the man kept swearing loudly as he talked to the child.
Everything the boy did seemed to be incorrect. He couldn’t have been older than 10, and it was obvious he was desperate to please his father. Their dynamic seemed strained, and he clearly cared for the man who was treating him so poorly. They quieted down after a few more loud curses and the child reminding the father “language,” only to be snapped at again. Over the next 20 minutes, we heard the father commanding the child to “shut up” … only to tell him to speak a moment later. He told the boy he’d put it was impolite to be using his phone at their table, that he didn’t know how to talk. The boy commented on how much he was enjoying his meal 9 times… I counted them all. Was he getting enough to eat?
Even more striking, though, was this offhand comment from the father to his son: “your mother has the brain of a goat.” I was left wondering what happened when they weren’t in public. If this is how the father was willing to act within hearing distance of 10+ people, what is his behavior like at home? Over the 40 or so minutes they sat beside us, the man shifted between snapping and kindness alarmingly quickly. As they walked out, he was making jokes with his son. They kept up a constant chatter throughout the meal, and by the time they left, it seemed that perhaps we’d hallucinated the hostility at the beginning of their breakfast… but we knew we hadn’t.
Why, you might be asking, am I writing this at all? It’s because of how I found myself feeling as we sat there. I wanted to speak up and say that the way he was treating his child was wrong… but as I built up the courage, he’d smile at his son or make a joke. I circled through the in my head over and over. I even found myself thinking of the TV show “What Would You Do?”; this reality series sets up situations in which some kind of maltreatment is occurring, and then they observe the reactions of bystanders. I was hoping that a camera crew would suddenly come from the back of the restaurant to reveal it was all an act. No one came.
And I ended up saying nothing at all. Was it my place, as a young college-student, a 20-year-old girl with no kids of her own, to tell the father what to do? Was it my place, as an adult, to stand up for the child? I don’t have the correct answer to those questions. I’m normally a person who can’t shut up… so why couldn’t I do anything? I don’t have the answer to that question either, and I wish I did. From now on, I’d like to believe I’ll do things differently. As for that one child, I’ll never know what was really going on a few tables away from me. If (and only if) it’s safe for you to do so, be braver than I was and say something.To learn more about what to do in situations like this one, visit the following resources:
Children’s Bureau: https://www.acf.hhs.gov/cb/faq/can6
Child Welfare Info Gateway: https://www.childwelfare.gov/organizations/?CWIGFunctionsaction=rols:main.dspList&rolType=custom&rs_id=5 Child
Abuse Network: https://www.childabusenetwork.org/
HCXO,
Megan