Parents who yell at terrified kids suck!

[wondernut]

I am sitting her my last few min of work listening to a terrified child scream bloody murder ..what is worse is that the parent is yelling even louder at the child "SHUT UP AND BEHAVE YOURSELF" "BE QUIET" "DO YOU HEAR ME I SAID SHUT UP" OMG this is a little child..and it has gone on and on ..first of all if your child is that loud and vocal they are obviously not that sick ..second how on earth can a parent expect a terrified child to respond to yelling at them to stop being terrfied??????

in about two seconds I am going to go in there and give them the number for parenting classes!

the worst thing ever is to threaten a kid with this appauling line "IF YOU DO NOT BEHAVE I WILL HAVE THIS NURSE GIVE YOU A SHOT"!!! I can not tell you in my very long career how many times I have gone off on parents who used this and me to instill fear in a child ..it is constantly used and I hate it! ..and oh no they do not get away with it with me... I stop all triage and make them "take what you just said back and tell this beautiful child I will not give them a shot because they are terrified! and please use YOUR indoor voice when you do"

parents screaming at terrified kids absolutely sucks the big one

thanks for listening

[seraphina]

I hate seeing kids treated like that. Heck I constantly beat myself up for being a bad parent but when I hear crap like that I know I am not.

Anyhow I really detest the phrase "shut up". It shouldn't be used at all, especially not to children. I really find it quite degrading. And yeah those kind of parents suck.

[LikeMinded]

One of the few rare good things about having been raised by my mother is that she would never blow up at me in public (lest anybody know she had severe anger issues, and that's putting it mildly). Sometimes the content of her threats would be the same as you described, but at least she'd say them in a calm voice as to not have anybody nearby notice. The calmness was really what I could read back when I was a young child, so at least I never took those threats personally.

At home, things were different... Mom and Dad showed off their 99% incapacity to raise a child --- especially Mom --- VERY explosive... and taunting/teasing too, she was/is 19 years my senior and had the capacity to act as a bullying older sister too because of that.

dianthus, your reply, I have to confess, brought more than one tear to my eye, knowing how well you as well as your son handled the situation at the doctor's office. "Treat your child as you wished to be treated when you were a child" -- that is something I wish my mother had known... and I hope I can be that way as a father in the future...

[wondernut]

I opted to go in and talk to the nurse who dealt with them and she was young and freaking out herself with all the yelling

I told her to bookmark the options for parenting classes and please do not allow a parent to continue like that ..just ask them to stop because "you can not complete a triage under those conditions" then just complete what you need to do quickly! with out more trauma ...we have bubbles stickers and crayons there are lots of distractions ..that is my belief ..just find something more interesting to focus on instead of the freak out ...

no one is perfect at parenting and yelling at kids happens but when a child is visually terrified how on earth does screaming help? it is abusive to everyone especially the child!

the problem a lot of the time is kids are allowed to come in in pain because parents think we will not believe they have a fever so no tylenol and after a very very long wait with out kind of pain or fever relief I would go ballistic freak out and not understand too

it is so frustrating ..I also see it done to elders with dementia when their kids are caring for them and they are upset or scared ..thier own kids will tell them to "shut up" it makes me want to cry ..I have reported a lot of abuse in my career and it not something I am happy with and the reason I left peds the parents burned me out

[LikeMinded]

it is so frustrating ..I also see it done to elders with dementia when their kids are caring for them and they are upset or scared ..thier own kids will tell them to "shut up" it makes me want to cry ..I have reported a lot of abuse in my career and it not something I am happy with and the reason I left peds the parents burned me out

That is terrible when that situation happens with a grown individual who's taking care of an elderly parent. At one of our local general hospitals (it serves a very large area that ranges from inner suburbs all the way out to remote countryside), I have seen this 'elder abuse' occur at least a few times. I once saw this elderly woman with fairly severe obesity and an almost right-angle hunchback struggle on her single-footed cane, ambling at about 0.1MPH while her daughter told her to quit being so lazy and hurry up. The mother kept asking for a wheelchair to get her to their car, but the daughter didn't even bother to hail a wheelchair escort from the service desk 500 feet away.

If 1) my male chauvinist side decided to go AWOL, and 2) I let go my belief that physical violence was wrong, my otherwise hot temper would have dictated that the daughter in question may have ended up in some serious pain herself. Seeing the mother struggle like that with her own family reflected my own struggle with illness (especially my 'physically' neurological one that was ignored and created some disability for me) was just too much for me... so I know how you feel there...