Ooookayyyy

Now. As we all know, children do not have so much of the impulse control yet, and as a consequence they do, or express the wish to do, some extremely odd things from time to time. This is pretty much a known fact. HOWEVER. It also seems to me, that it is the duty and responsibility of the parents of said children to prevent their offspring from undertaking such of these odd things as may be potentially harmful to them. Such as talking to complete strangers. At a bare minimum, it might be wise to teach one's children that it is rather impolite to go running up to a complete stranger who is minding their own business reading a magazine, jump at them slamming both feet down onto the tile floor in a loud manner, and yell "HI!!!!" If for some reason one cannot contrive to teach them this, it might at least be wise to discourage them when they announce their intention to do same, rather than telling them, "OK, go say hi, honey!"

Sigh. At least when, rather than my immediately being overcome with raptures at the kyoootness of said child, I peered at him over my glasses and said to him, "Why are you doing that? I don't understand.", it did occur to the dimbulbs that it might be wise to remove the little dear posthaste rather than becoming indignant at my lack of rapture. The part that disturbed me was that it appeared to genuinely not have occurred to them previously that this behavior was inappropriate, as opposed to "But it's just wunnerful for my little pweshus to do that!!!" Somehow, the "know and don't care" is less perturbing than the idea of the existence of people who are actually so dumb as not to know better.

Oh, and? The juvenile perpetrator was not a toddler, who might reasonably be simply unable to process the concept of "stranger". This kid was about 6-7, well into the school age range. He also showed no signs of mental disability or such that might explain it, and I can normally spot those a mile away. We can guess who is going to turn up on the 10:00 news Amber Alert next...