Sometimes children have spontaneous temper tantrums.
These can be brought on by just about anything (a sibling bothering them, a parent refusing them something, you name it). But sometimes these tantrums happen simply because there’s not enough happening — the toddler gets bored and impatient and, feeling fitful and restless, acts out.
Ask any parent and they’ll tell you the worst place for a kid to have a tantrum is at the store.
Yet this is where most kids act out, simply because shopping is something that does not interest them. It’s not a particularly fun outing for them, and if they don’t get to do what they want or they start feeling restless, a tantrum is basically inevitable. There’s nothing any parent can really do about that.
When one mother was shopping at a Kmart in New Zealand, she had her three young boys with her.
According to Cafe Mom , the boys were 6, 4, and 2-years-old. After spending some time gathering her purchases, the mom (identified only as Rebecca) got in line at the checkout with her children.
Her youngest started getting fussy which then turned into a full-blown tantrum.
Rebecca explained that she tried to calm the toddler but wasn’t able to. To make matters worse, the self-serve kiosk she was checking out at kept freezing.
“It was getting quite bad,” she said.
After briefly abandoning the crying child, Rebecca turned around just at the right moment to see a woman ram her cart into his head.
“She said ‘Take him bloody home! Be quiet! I don’t come here to listen to this!”’ Rebecca said.
But the cart wasn’t the only means of silencing the boy that the stranger used.
Rebecca filed a formal complaint with the store who then reviewed surveillance footage of the scene.
The manager then called Rebecca to deliver some shocking news.
“He said to me, ‘I’m sorry to do this to you… but I feel it’s the right thing to do,'” Rebecca said. “‘We’ve reviewed the video footage in detail and we can see that she has actually punched your son in the head with quite some force, when your back was turned.'”
Rebecca has now contacted the police to track down the woman who assaulted her son at the store.
She said the toddler is fine, though he does have two large lumps on his head from the incident.
As a mom, Rebecca said she feels responsible to find the woman who did this to her son.
“To know that someone has punched him in the head and I haven’t reacted. … he’ll be like ‘This is normal for people to do this to me,'” Rebecca said. “I don’t want him to be physiologically damaged.”
The police have confirmed they’re looking into the incident but no arrests have been made.
We just hope they’re able to find this woman because honestly, who could ever in their right mind think it’s okay to do this to a child?
