On Sunday, dh and I went to Jerusalem, along with ds18.  Dh and I needed to sign the final paperwork for our mortgage (thank G-d, finally complete – it was delayed because the person handling it was on vacation and they wouldn’t release the file to anyone else to work on so we had to wait until he returned from the vacation!!), and though ds18 was accepted to his yeshiva without an interview based on the strength of his recommendations, they said it would be nice if he could come in before the term officially begins.

The bus ride from Karmiel to Jerusalem is almost three hours, which allowed us a nice amount of time to rest, read, and wonder why they don’t have bathrooms on these long distance buses.  🙂  Once we got there, we took care of the bank paperwork, then decided we’d have lunch before going over to ds’s yeshiva.

We couldn’t find a schwarma shop, which is what we wanted, so we finally settled on a pizza place.  There was a young couple there with two young children, and as we were getting ready to leave, I noticed the little girl, maybe four years old, was crying for her mother.  So I went over to see what was wrong and – her parents had left the pizza shop and forgotten her behind.  I went out to the busy street to find them, hoping I would remember what they looked like, but no luck.  Meanwhile, I was reassuring their little girl that we’d find them soon and not to worry.

I went back to the pizza shop and asked the owners if he remembered what the parents looked like, and he told me they were driving a red car.  I went back out, along with someone else who by then had gotten concerned about the situation, and spotted a red car about a block away.  The other woman pushed the little girl in that direction and told her to run to her car, but I was uncomfortable abdicating responsibility without seeing an adult actively taking charge of her so I stayed to keep an eye on her.

A moment later, her mother came driving up and her father came from somewhere else and spoke to her.  The other person grasped what happened before I did, and told me: they hadn’t accidentally forgotten her.  They told her it was time to leave, but she didn’t want to go.  So they purposely left without her, while the father stood out of sight in a nearby storefront to keep an eye on her.

Regarding the backdrop of this mini-drama, we weren’t in a quiet residential neighborhood.  We were in a very, very busy area by a four lane highway, and besides the obvious safety concerns, it would have frightened someone much older to have been left in an unfamiliar place like that.  I have a four year old and can only imagine how terrified he would have been in that situation.

When I realized that the father must have seen me walking back and forth searching for her parents with her crying next to me, but stayed hidden so he could teach his daughter a lesson, I was furious.   I’m a strong proponent of showing kids you mean what you say, following through, etc, but there’s a way to do it, and this wasn’t it.  To traumatize a young child like this and purposely let her think she was abandoned is horrific.

I walked away when I saw the little girl was with her parents, but by the time I was half a block away, I was so upset about this situation that I strongly regretted that I hadn’t told her parents my thoughts on their misguided approach to parenting and discipline.  I really try not to be judgmental of what I see when I’m out – all of us are sometimes tired and cranky, and it’s not fair to judge people based on what might not be a typical parenting scenario for them.  But in this case, I felt very, very strongly that they had chosen a damaging approach to teach a lesson, and the lesson learned probably wasn’t quite the one they thought they were teaching.

Children deeply need the security of knowing that their parents are there for them, will protect them and love them no matter what.   And as a parent, this isn’t an easy thing to consistently communicate.  But choosing a disciplinary approach like this is to actively teach a child that her parents can’t be trusted to be there for her.  Even as an adult, when people you’re depending on let you down, you’re going to be more reserved and cautious before making yourself vulnerable with them again.

From their behavior in the pizza shop, I think these were nice people, definitely well-intended.  I’m positive they only wanted to show their daughter that she needed to listen to them when they told her something.  Sometimes we don’t have have accurate information or good advice to guide us, and we make sad mistakes like this.

Avivah