Feeling the Pain of a Mother Who Lost Control

I had just finished dragging my daughter out of the pool, pulling her through the living room and up the stairs to her room--to serve her timeout for a tantrum--when I saw the video clip flash on my television set.

A harried mother, loaded down with packages, was dragging her young son by his shirt along the floor of a department store. We couldn’t see her face, but her body language signaled both her frustration and her resolve. She walked briskly down the aisle, heading toward the exit, looking straight ahead--at neither her child nor the shocked bystanders alongside them--while her son slid along the floor behind her, his T-shirt tight in her grip.

“This graphic footage of child abuse was caught on tape by the security camera at a department store,” the local news anchor breathlessly announced.

He narrated the action, as the mother stopped, adjusted her packages and bent down to pick up her son, pulling him up by his ears when he balked. The child grimaced, as if in pain, and his mother leaned toward him, her face contorted with anger.

In the mall, she was joined by a teenage girl, who grabbed the child’s feet and helped the woman carry him--thrashing and wiggling now--toward the exit.

The next shot was a courtroom scene. The mother, looking mournful and scared, stood before a judge, flanked by lawyers. She is being prosecuted on felony child abuse charges. The case, out of Springfield, Ohio, got big play last week on news broadcasts around the country. Locally, at least one station that aired the story then produced the requisite parenting expert to warn us that we must never, never drag our children along the floor or pick them up by their ears.

Try taking a deep breath to calm yourself and talking to them in a firm but gentle manner, then disciplining them when you get home with more “reasonable” and “appropriate” measures, such as timeouts or a loss of privileges.

Which is all well and good but begs the question . . . so how do you get the kid out of the store?

*

Maybe there are mothers who have never been faced with a balky or misbehaving child, never had to confront a tantrum in public. I salute them, and I suppose they’re entitled to cluck-cluck over the barbarism this mother displayed, to applaud prosecutors’ decision to try to jail her for abusing her son.

But I suspect most of us who watched that videotape felt the mother’s pain, as well as her child’s, and breathed a sigh of relief that we have never been filmed at our worst, never been caught red-handed manhandling our children, never had our frustration captured on camera and beamed into homes across the country for an entire nation to pass judgment upon.

For the record, I have never yanked my children up by their ears or dragged them across the floor in a public place. But I have felt the anger and frustration that might have led that mother to take that path. I know how helpless a grown-up can feel in the face of a small child’s defiance, how humiliating it is to watch your child spin out of control in public, how much patience and prayer and sheer will it can take to keep a tired mother from losing her grip.

In the days since the clip aired last week, I’ve heard the incident discussed in coffee shops and grocery stores, in the cafeteria at work, the lobby at church, the dressing room at a department store teeming with mothers and kids.

And just as the film portrayed a parent’s nightmare, the conversations revealed the gap between those in the trenches of parenting, and those who still have the luxury of believing there is no parenting problem that the magic of an immediate timeout cannot solve.

“I thought it was just awful,” the young clerk at Starbucks complained. “I mean, if she couldn’t handle the kid, she should have left him at home with a baby-sitter! I couldn’t believe she did that.”

The woman behind me in line muttered under her breath. “If they don’t hurry this line, she’s gonna see worse than that.” She was frantically bouncing a baby, whose face was red from crying. A toddler was clutching her leg, whining something unintelligible, and a little boy who looked to be about 4 was jamming his toy airplane into sacks of coffee on display, screeching with laughter every time a bag of coffee beans cascaded to the floor.

“I’m sorry,” she said, bending to retrieve the coffee as the boy headed for a rack of glass mugs. “It’s just been a long day.” It was not yet noon.

Even the telephone operator who helped route my calls to Ohio, as I tried to track the status of the case, confessed that watching the video gave her chills.

“Once when my daughter was 3, she threw a tantrum in the middle of J.C. Penney’s,” she said. “She fell out, kicking and screaming. And I just had it. I just walked away. . . . I didn’t know what to do, so I just walked away, like I didn’t know her. Because I could see everybody looking at her and I just didn’t know what to do.

“I suppose that makes me a really bad mother. I’m just glad nobody caught it on tape.”

*

I don’t know what I would have done if I’d witnessed that Ohio mom’s breakdown. Whether I would condemn or excuse her might depend, I suppose, on how my own day had gone.

There is too much we don’t know to judge her. Maybe she is truly abusive and needs the punishment of a stint behind bars. Or maybe her son is one of those inherently wild children who is impervious to discipline and cannot be controlled by ordinary measures.

Perhaps we caught her on the tail end of a very bad day . . . her boss yelled at her and the dog got out and the kids spilled soda all over the sofa. And now she had to schlep to the mall for a birthday gift for her mother-in-law, even though her son was cranky and she was tired.

Maybe if I’d been there, standing by, I would have pointed her out to my children . . . “See, that’s what’ll happen if you misbehave.”

But I’d like to think that I, or someone else, would have stepped over to that mother and offered a hand, a little understanding.

“You must be exhausted. I know just how you feel. . . . Why don’t I carry those packages for you so you can carry your boy to the car?”

Because no child should be dragged along the floor or picked up by his ears. But no mother should feel so alone, so overwhelmed that she can see no other way out of a store.

*

Sandy Banks’ column runs on Sundays and Tuesdays. She’s at sandy.banks@latimes.com.