Grocery Cart Kids

Take your kids to the grocery store, and keep the video games at home. 

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Who decided that taking your kid to the grocery store was supposed to be a joy ride for the little tykes? I know, I know, we want our kids to be happy. I also guess that a lot of moms and dads are working, so if shopping is to be done, well, little Annie and the twins have to come along as well.

I have no problem with that. A million years ago I always went grocery shopping with my mother. Most likely it was because she didn’t want me burning down the house. She’d plop my eight year old ass in the magazine section and I would sit on the floor and read comic books for an hour. Nobody really cared unless you made a mess, comics strewn all over the floor. Certainly not the customers, unless they couldn’t get by and then they’d just yell at you or run you over. The grocery store workers would circle by like Apache scouts and tell you to straighten up the mess. I understand it was simpler then. Now every mother is scared to death that if their child is out of sight for fifteen seconds someone from the deli department is going to abduct them and sell them into slavery in Cambodia.

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But why all these little carriers and signs, vehicles and ride on things at the grocery store? If you’re little then just sit in the seat built into the grocery cart. They even have seat belts for kids. Growing up I can’t remember a single incidence where one of my friends suffered traumatic brain injury from falling out of their shopping cart. If you’re in the seat you have to look directly at your mother or father the entire time, but maybe that’s what it was meant for. “Keeping an eye on you” means exactly that. Oh wait, here’s something that you could do…talk to each other. The kid is a captured audience. Soon they’ll be teenagers and they won’t want to be seen with you in the grocery store, or anywhere else for that matter. Educational researchers have come to the pretty simple theory that children who are spoken to a lot, especially in dialogue form (meaning questions and answers, back and forth), end up being better students and better readers. Surprising? I don’t think so. Who knows, you might even talk about what you’re buying, likes and dislikes, and imagine this… how much things cost? Maybe math skills would go up as well?

And as for behavior? My job never was, nor is it yours, to constantly entertain your offspring. I’m not a juggler, a stand up comedian, or Broadway singer. They should be able to sit relatively quiet for a bit of time. There’s enough stuff going on in a grocery store to keep their attention for a little while. Every aisle is filled with a thousand items in various colors and sizes. It might be fun to see how many cereals they can name, call out the various colors of the fruit found in the vegetable aisle or someday understand the difference between whole milk, skim milk, 1%, 2% and half and half.

And here’s one last grocery store rant. When I see a kid with his or her face planted in some little video game while he’s being wheeled around the Super Stop and Shop I want to scream. It’s bad enough that they sit for hours at home, fingers twitching and synapses firing over imaginary two dimensional adventures. You could haul these kids to the store, plug them in, and ask them later where they’d been and many might not even remember. And the main reason that parents use this device is so that their kids will just shut the hell up and not bug them while they’re trying to get the shopping done.

Real life is out there, where people live, where things happen. Even in the grocery store. O.K. strap them in, but talk to them. Maybe they’ll learn what organic or gluten free means.

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