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Yeah, I wonder how much of this is just parents not being good at what they do.
It's hard to say-- I do think kids come into the world with some fairly strong personality tendencies, and some kids are just more prone to tantrums than others. But I also know a lot of parents who get caught in the "ineffectual pleading" cycles.
I've found that a little bit of enforcement of punishment (simple stuff like a time out, taking away a toy, etc) up front can prevent a lot of those embarrassing moments when your kid needs to be on their "best" behavior. For most of the situations in which they are in public, they needn't be quiet or particularly polite. Kids will be squirrelly and that's fine. But if they're throwing a tantrum... well, yeah, it's really a shame that it turns off all the non-kid-havers.
A good chunk of it is; it's not like there's any objective way to measure performance beyond stuff, everyone has an opinion (and the more competent parents are, paradoxically, more likely to take advice they shouldn't be; the less competent ones won't), a first impression from "literally baby" tends to be detrimental to noticing the areas where that's no longer true.
But more than those things (and much as parents will parrot this when attempting to assert vetoes over stuff their future teenagers will do), parents are generally way too close to the problem. Stuff that's obviously wrong to outside observers won't clock that way, and since the only person who'll ever be held to account for that is them 10-40 years down the line, with a healthy dose of "well, it worked, didn't it?", it's not something one is going to casually get shocked out of doing.
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I think if you teach the kids to be polite and charming and hold a conversation with an adult (which is often pretty easy since children like positive attention, and which you can do at a pretty young age, depending on the kid's personality) it makes adults more forgiving of the squirrellyness and in turn makes parents less uptight and prone to hissing ineffectual threats at them. And if they're your kids, it will make your conversations with them more interesting as well. (I also second your observation that actually enforcing punishment works!)
Also, young children are really hilarious. The closest thing I've ever seen to Loony Toons in real life has got to be pre-k kids discovering basic principles (obvious to any adult) like "socks on hardwood floors are slippery." By all means keep your kids safe, don't let them run with scissors and what have you, but if they are healthy and active they will find ways to generate their own slapstick comedy routine daily and if you can just laugh at the harmless but shocking foibles instead of getting sucked into their frame of mind about how the latest insult to their tiny person is a catastrophe of truly monumental proportions you'll find them much more entertaining.
For various reasons, I basically raised my younger brother.
When he was a toddler, he had a toy truck with a nine volt battery in it. Once he discovered the latch, he decided he was going to eat that battery. With God as his witness, that battery was going in his mouth. No force on heaven or earth would stop him.
For three solid weeks, I did everything in my power to keep him from eating that battery. Eventually it reached the point where I had to use the bathroom, and when I came out, I saw that he had pushed a chair up to the counter and had scaled the cupboards to grab the toy from the top of the fridge.
At that point I figured that letting him taste the forbidden fruit was probably safer than the lengths he'd go through to get it, so I put the toy on the ground and let him go to town.
Immediately after the contacts hit his tongue, a look of absolute betrayal crossed his face that I have never seen on anyone else before or since. Through tears, he asked why did you do that?
He never tried to eat a battery again, though.
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