Disturbing thing I saw

What would you have said and in what tone?

I don’t think there’s really a problem with putting a soft roll of tissues on top ob a baby.

It is a problem when the baby is in a shopping cart. If I was the cashier, I would weigh the baby and buy it.

I know. It’s just that sometimes things can get overwhelming, and Mommy needs to improvise a bit. Just sayin’ (Hey, I do those sort of things too, gonna arrest me? or worse, scream at me?)

wiy- picking your yogurt when your baby starts crying is not neglectful. If the baby was in pain or had been screaming for 5 min yes, but an infant doesnt have to be picked up the minute he starts crying.

If the baby could have been hurt by what was put around/on him, then it would upset me. If the baby was in a big puffy snowsuit and she put a bag of lollies on him, nope doesnt bother me. Not that i would personally do it. But i have put light groceries next to a baby sitting in the stroller

so, thats what it’s about.. its about you not wanting to hear a screaming baby while shopping. well, get used to it if you are going to spend your times in frum neighborhoods and shop in those stores.

When you say that she had a 3-5 month old baby in the top of the cart, I assume that it was in the car seat. Then you say that the baby shouldn’t be in the cart in the first place. Where do you propose that she put the baby? Leave the baby at home (which includes paying for a baby sitter during the time she’s shopping)? In the stroller that has the car seat attachment? Have you ever tried pushing two shopping carts through the store? You could be in the store for an extra half hour, during which time I’m sure that baby would be at the end of his/her patience and needing a diaper change/feeding/etc, and would let you know his/her displeasure very loudly. A woman with a small baby has limited energy (since she’s probably been up half the previous night dealing with said baby), limited time (since said baby is going to need to be fed/changed probably in an hour or so, and has limited monetary resources so they want to get the best deals they can in the shortest amount of time possible.

WIY, I’m surprised at you. It’s obvious that you’re not married since you express yourself this way. Yes, it is very commendable that you are worrying about the way this woman is treating her baby, but have you considered the other factors involved in shopping with a little one? I assume that the baby is strapped into the car seat, but unfortunately the tops of shopping carts rarely fit a car seat in a way that is very secure or maybe she hadn’t learned how to hook it on properly. If she had put the baby in the bottom of the shopping cart, then she for sure would not have had space to put the rest of the groceries in the cart, if you’ve already said that there was stuff on top of the baby but you didn’t say that the rest of the cart was empty. If she’s buying nosh, which this baby obviously can’t enjoy yet, she probably has a few other kids at home, at least one, and you should be grateful that she did not bring the whole load with her so that you would have enjoyed hearing them all screaming “Buy me this mommy”, you get the point.

I think being married and having children requires people to be able to see situations from the other person’s point of view. What bothered you about this situation has plenty of room to be dan le’kav zechus for the mother, but I don’t hear you doing that. I hope you won’t be like this when you get married.

Once jokingly a cashier to weigh one of my kids, but we agreed that he was priceless.

I took my baby shopping yesterday. I put her car seat in the big part of the cart and placed all the things around her car seat. She was 100% safe. I made sure nothing could have fallen on her but I’m sure people thought like you did.

WIY,

The baby was not in any seat just lying across the width of the top small section of the shopping cart

That does sound strange to me. Was the baby lying on a blanket or something at least?

WIY: First thought that came to mind as i read your original post was ignoring abuse is abuse. Not that this is abuse, but it should definitely be brought to her attention. I would probably say something along the lines of “it might look safe to keep a baby there, but the holes for the legs are too wide to protect the baby from falling out. Can i push your wagon while you hold your baby?” She’d either take you up on your offer or get the hint..

Little Froggie: nothing should be placed on a baby. a roll of toilet paper isnt an exception. Thats like saying that leaving a baby in a bathtub with less than inch of water is ok. As a mommy of an under a year baby, I can agree that we all do things that could land us in hot water if DSS or CPS saw. But putting an infant in a situation that they cannot help themselves in is neglectful and selfish of the mom.

SaysMe: it doesnt matter how thick the snowsuit is, plastic should NEVER EVER be put near or on a child/baby/infant!

Nechomah: The OP wrote “top part so she hadhim lying across the width”, I would assume that means just what it says, that the infant was in the wagon itself. I’m not going to say that i dont do it, but car seats clicked onto the shopping cart arent as safe either, unless the mom is holding onto and facing the wagon the entire time. (“If she’s buying nosh, which this baby obviously can’t enjoy yet, she probably has a few other kids at home, at least one, and you should be grateful that she did not bring the whole load with her so that you would have enjoyed hearing them all screaming” Should be thought not said out loud..)I dont know how you could put someone else down, the way you are going on and on about if the child is in a car seat, where the car seat is, if there are other children, how loud the children would be, etc… According to your own words, it would make sense that you arent a parent either “I think being married and having children requires people to be able to see situations from the other person’s point of view.” The OP seems to be disturbed about how a mother may have put her baby in a dangerous situation and if (s)he was wrong feeling this way.

HaKatan: The OP mentioned that the “baby” was 3-5 months old. I dont think thats old enough to enjoy playing with groceries and if the infant was laying down in the wagon, definitely not safe…

interjection: lol! Actually many people woudlnt think that way if they saw you with your baby that way! I was in a store with a woman who also had her baby in the car seat in the back part of the wagon with groceries all around and asked to take a picture!! Its actually quite safe as the groceries stabilize the car seat from falling back and forth and the wagon prevents baby from falling out!

WIY,

I still don’t feel comfortable judging her because there’s no way for me to know all of the circumstances. What you describe though does sound unsafe and uncomfortable, and shouldn’t be done.

If the child is too young to be asked permission then don’t do it.

This reasoning is being used to attack bris milah all over the Western world.

You are all correct.

WIY is correct to be disturbed when he saw what he saw. It is a sign of a rachamon which is a siman of a yid to have pity on a strangers child. I’m sure he would have felt the same had it been a non jewish baby.

The posters sympathetic to the mother are also correct. What could she have done? She has been blessed with a baby and had nowhere else to put it. Would she have done this to the baby of a relative she was looking after for the day? Of course not. It is only because she feels restricted and inhibited by the pressure of having to run a house while on low energy and deprived of sleep and on top of all to be unable to go anywhere without having to shlep the baby with that led her to act in this way.

So who or what is at fault? Boy am I gonna open a can of worms now but this is truly what I feel and it makes me mad.

It is one of several faults in our frum system that pressures us into having large families that only the most capable and geshikt people can cope yet the rest of us do it too with that allows senarios such as this.

It is also a fault of the same system when very young children, probably of the same families as in WIY’s opening post, are seen walking several of their even younger siblings to school and back crossing busy roads etc.

It is also a fault of the same system where many young men who are not cut out to sit in yeshiva and learn gemara all day long are not advised to go study to gain the qualifications that could help them with parnasah in later life but are kept in yeshiva and then kolel and then when their kids grow up and they cant afford school yeshiva and seminary fees for them and cannot put money away for their weddings they have nowhere to turn.

Where are the next generation of frum professionals coming from?The local hachnosas kalahs worldwide are in crisis. Never before have there been such demands on their limited finances. More and more of us are turning to them for help with our ever growing families to ask for financial assistance. More and more of our local mosdos are fighting to keep afloat financially also, with less and less gevirim around for them to seek help from.

When oh when is there going to be a serious kehillah wide approach to find solutions for these and other similar issues?

It could be that you don’t view the mother as human.

Thanks, oomis.

I was also unhappy at the thought of putting a baby in such an unsafe position.

I was not successful in getting the message across in my post.

But your post makes it perfectly clear.

No surprise there, as your subtitle is obviously not just a figment of someone’s imagination.

You probably didn’t do a half bad job as a Mommy (Ima?) either.

golfer – I agree with you and Oomis but I am not understanding how this set up isn’t safe. It is much safer than perching a car seat on top of a bar on a cart facing 4 feet of nothingness. I must be visualizing something very different than you are. “

Golfer, thank you very much for your very kind words in the other post. And yes, I am Ema to my kids.

SYAG: of COURSE you don’t put the car seat across the top! It can ONLY fit inside the wagon (which is what I did at times, with my child’s snowsuit unzipped,the hat and mittens off, and facing me, so the baby could see me, if he or she was awake. But they never went into the front raised seat part until they were old enough to sit upright without sliding sideways. I also brought along a safety harness when I went shopping, to strap them in securely, once they did sit up front. All it takes is ONE SECOND for a child to maneuver the body enough to fall out, while the mom is chatting with a friend, ro reading a food label.

I tried very hard to avoid having to go shopping with my babies altogether. That is not avoidable for many parents, so it really is best if they either go together and one carries (or strolls with) or stays in the car with the baby, or stays home while the other parent shops. I didn’t drive for a long time, so my husband and I went together, and he took the baby in the stroller or I used the Snugli carrier.

I understand how hard it is, but I see dumb things being done all the time by parents. I’ve seen babies in their strollers left alone outside a store, 18 month old infants walking alone blocks from their home, because no one was watching them, kids allowed to stand up in the backseat of the moving family car (this was before the car seat and seatbelt laws were in effect), parents feeding 2 year olds hot dogs and popcorn or whole grapes. You get the picture. Parents do a lot of foolish and sometimes potentially deadly things with their babies. And nebbich, sometimes the babies pay the price for their parents’ actions. I daven for Hashem to protect ALL children from the consequences of such careless and reckless behavior.

i think some posters are visualizing ‘the top part’ of the shopping cart as the place for toddlers to tosit with their feet hanging forward out, and some as the upper half level of the 2 levelled shopping carts…

Miritchka- i didnt mean that. I meant that even if someone were worried abt the object on the baby poking the baby’s stomach or legs because of a corner, the puffy snowsuit would prevent that. You are right the lolly example was a bad one because of plastic.

Trust789- +1!!!!

And i think the permission/dignity thing is going too far. You dont ask your child whether he’d like a needle, or if he wants to brush his teeth. Or in this case, if the screaming child was 4 and you are of the opinion that such a child should be taken out of the store, do you ask him to follow you, or pick him up and walk out? You do not need your child’s permission to give him a chore (at least not under 8 for the liberal-minded), and yes as a parent, you can give appropriate punishment/consequences. It’s not dignifying to change a child’s dirty diaper or spilled on shirt either.

Ken zayn- you are blaming the system for pushing mothers to have ‘too many’ children which you say causes them to act improperly from exhaustion etc as you see applicable in this scenario. One key point missing though: from what we knoe, this mother only has one child.

The only correct response is offer to help the poor overloaded woman, who has to manage a baby and cartful of groceries somehow single-handedly.

This has nothing to do with family size, I don’t think WIY said there was 10 babies in the cart.

Next time, just offer to push her stuff to the checkout so she can hold the baby.

Oomis – the car seat is actually made to clip onto the upper part of the shopping cart. I didn’t feel safe doing that though, I didn’t like the distance from the floor. I also don’t like seeing kids spend hours in their carseats, moving from place to place but never actually being moved. It is very unhealthy but because they keep changing environments the parents don’t always realize they have been stuck in one position for so long.

P.S. nice to meet another Ema, most are Imas. “

I agree, it’s not safe, or a particularly good idea altogether.

And ditto on the “Ema” part. My five year old greanddaughter started to refer to me as Ema when she was two, because that’s what she heard her mother calling me. I kept correcting her and saying, “Bubby,” but she was insistent on saying Ema. After a gazillion times of my saying Bubby to her her, she looked at me with a mischievous twinkle in her eye and said, “BubbyEMA!” We both broke out laughing, and she only called me Bubby after that. She KNEW exactly what she was doing!

As to this whole issue of helping the mother: to be fair, shoppers are there to shop. It is not always practical or even possible to stop what you are doing to help another shopper who should have used better sense to begin with. If help CAN be offered, it absolutely should be, but it is not always something that can be done (maybe you have your own children or grandchildren with you). And what if there are more than the one overloaded shopper with babies in tow? Are we supposed to drop everything and do their shopping or cart-pushing for ALL of them? That is neither practical nor reasonable. And what’s worse, I would end up feeling GUILTY for not helping (when I couldn’t), even though that too, would be unfair and unreasonable, because it is not in our control.

In this one specific instance perhaps help could have been offered, but in the final analysis, some women need a better plan for shopping excursions, that do not include putting their infants in this type of situation. There is ALWAYS another way to handle the shopping issue, unless the woman is a single mom with no friends or family members to help. If she has an able-bodied husband, then it is his responsibility to either do the shopping when he has a break, or watch the baby while the wife shops.

Because of the association with backpacks and pockets.

oomis, not to argue the point, but I am still not sure what you are visualizing. A 3-5 month old baby wrapped in a blanket can lay down snuggly in this space with walls on ALL sides coming up a good 6 inches around him and space on all sides. Whether you would place him there or not, I am not sure what about it seems so misguided.