🚨Everybody is arguing about whether the store employee was right or wrong. Frankly, that’s not what caught my attention.
What caught my attention was the child standing there holding a stuffed animal while all of this was unfolding.
The employee asked for a receipt. Whether the request was justified or not isn’t even my point. My point is that a routine interaction immediately became a public confrontation, complete with profanity, hostility, and humiliation, and there was a child standing there watching every second of it.
As adults, we often forget that children are always learning. They don’t just listen to what we tell them. They watch what we do. They watch how we respond to stress. They watch how we treat strangers. They watch how we handle authority, frustration, embarrassment, and conflict.
What concerns me isn’t the argument itself.
It’s the lesson.
Psychologists have spent decades studying child development, attachment, and social learning. One of the most consistent findings is that children tend to normalize the behaviors they repeatedly observe. If respect, self-control, accountability, and emotional stability are modeled, those behaviors become familiar. If chaos, hostility, emotional volatility, and public confrontations are modeled, those become familiar too.
Now before anyone starts accusing me of predicting this child’s future, that’s not what I’m doing. Nobody can watch a short video and know what a child’s future will be.
What we can identify is risk.
Research has consistently shown that children who grow up around chronic conflict, emotional instability, inconsistent discipline, trauma, aggression, and poor emotional regulation face elevated risks for anxiety, depression, substance abuse, behavioral problems, academic difficulties, and troubled relationships later in life.
The reason is simple. Children build their understanding of the world from the examples around them. Even when around uncivilized savages.
In developmental psychology there are three questions children are constantly trying to answer. How do people treat each other? What am I worth? Can relationships be trusted?
The answers to those questions are rarely taught in a lecture. They’re demonstrated every day through behavior.
That’s why this video bothered me.
The employee will go home. The internet will move on to the next viral clip. Most people will forget this happened by next week.
The child probably won’t.
Because while everyone else was watching an argument, that child was receiving a lesson on what adulthood looks like.
Like
@RepAlGreen did today with
@SecMullinDHS
And that’s the part of this video that should concern us the most.
#SilentMajoritySpeaks #AStoneGroove