If you think a child will never get away from his parents, then you don’t get that it’s impossible to watch them and keep them in check all the time.
So what? That’s completely beside the point.
What matters is that, as their parent, difficult or not, impossible or not, it is entirely your responsibility to watch them and keep them in line. You do not have the right to impose that responsibility on anyone else. If you manage this long enough that your children make it into adulthood, like millions of parents do every day, then good for you. But if you can’t, well that’s your problem.
Look, it’s very simple. Regardless of how much a tearaway your children are, there really are some obvious basic things you, as a parent, need to teach them by the time they are four years old. These things include, but are not limited to:
1) Don’t touch things on the stove.
2) Don’t put anything you find on the ground in your mouth.
3) Don’t drink anything from under the kitchen sink.
4) Don’t play with knives or matches.
5) Don’t play in traffic.
6) Don’t run near the swimming pool.
7) Don’t stick things into the electrical sockets.
8) Don’t draw to an inside straight.
9) Don’t talk to strangers.
10) DON’T CLIMB INTO THE GORILLA PIT.
Is that so difficult to figure out? I mean seriously, if a mother can’t handle teaching her progeny the obvious basics like that by the age of four, then she has no business trying to be a parent. And if she fails at it, she only has herself to blame.
I hadn’t read anything other than the headlines on this, but I appreciate the details about the kid telling his parents over and over that he was going to go in there. At that point, I take back what I said about it being 100% the zoo’s fault. The parents should have left that exhibit and ended it right there.
No problem. Here’s what we know for sure. The child was not a baby like several news agencies are reporting. He was four years old. He just looks small compared to the gorilla because mature male gorillas are really really big. This was not the first time the child attempted to get into the gorilla enclosure that day, and he had repeatedly announced his intentions to enter the enclosure several minutes prior to his successful attempt. According to adjacent witnesses there was a minimum of sixty seconds between the last time the boy’s mother told the boy not to enter the enclosure and when he climbed the fence, crawled through the two meters of low screening plants, and then dropped, not fell, into the pit. During this interval the mother was reportedly: “Doing something with her phone.”
I mean I understand that it can be hard to be a parent. I understand it can be hard to keep 100% control of them 100% of the time. But for f~~~s sake when a child keeps trying to get into the gorilla enclosure shouldn’t that mean the parent should be extra vigilant instead of f~~~ing around with her goddamn phone? I mean if a parent doesn’t prioritize her own child’s safety over her next f~~~ing selfie, why the f~~~ are the rest of us expected to? Why is the zoo expected to?
Also where the f~~~ was the father? I keep hearing about the boy’s mother being witnessed, being investigated, and so on, but not the father. I can’t help but think that had the father been there that day by the gorilla pit instead of just the mother, none of this would have happened.
ScarberianMPTGL 3 years, 8 months ago.
