I’ve witnessed any number of incidents involving bratty children and inept parenting in public. In one case, a little girl in a store – who’d been denied the purchase of a little notepad with an airbrushed pegasus on the cover – dropped to the floor, beating her fists and kicking her feet against the carpet and screaming her lungs out, before getting up and knocking the contents of a nearby shelf to the floor. The mother relented and bought the notepad, sighing gratefully for the girl’s now-improved mood, and apparently thinking the 89 cent sale would make it up to the store employees for having to clean up her daughter’s mess, which she turned her back on as they exited the store. In another case, a little boy who was already being bought a toy tried to wrestle the bag out of his mother’s hand. When she resisted, he stabbed his index finger at her, stared balefully into her eyes – with no fear – and spat at her, “Mommy, that’s my toy. Give–me–my–toy–right–NOW!” She grinned wearily at the astonished clerk, with that glib Kids; what can you do? look.

Naturally, I have simmering in my head a whole list of things you can do. Teaching them discipline and giving them consequences for their actions are two ideas that spring to mind (or failing that, a game of “How Far Can I Hit Your Favorite Toy With A Baseball Bat?”). However, as much as I believe in holding parents responsible for their children’s upbringing – a practice that people like Joe Lieberman and Jack Thompson want to eliminate – I also believe that social problems are like ticks: unless you get them out by the root, the rest is just going to grow back. And I think the root of this particular problem is bratty adults.

Everywhere I go in public, I’m confronted by grown men and women who, when they are in the role of a customer, expect everything to go their way. You know the ones I mean. They expect what they want to buy to be in stock no matter how high the demand. They expect the price for everything to be negotiable. They expect to be given things for free if some poor kid made a mistake. They expect a coupon for a free cheeseburger to be redeemable at the tire dealership down the street. They expect to “buy” a plasma TV for Super Bowl weekend and then return it on Monday, greasy and flecked with dried beer, for a full refund.

They expect everybody to listen to them and agree with them. They expect not to be inconvenienced. When they don’t get their way, they expect to bitch and cry about it loudly, and they expect someone in charge to bend over backwards to give them what they want. And if that person does not oblige, they expect to go over that person’s head, as many levels as necessary before someone unfamiliar with the situation grants them their desire.

Unfortunately, their expectations are usually correct.

Years ago, while working at a drugstore, I encountered a woman who wanted to return an electric hair dryer. You know how a hair dryer looks when it gets old: the plastic is dingy and scratched, the vent is caked with dust, and the power cord is permanently twisted from years of being wrapped around the barrel of the dryer during storage. This dryer looked like that, plus it wasn’t a model we had ever carried. I actually laughed in her face as I pointed these things out, but she insisted half-heartedly that she’d bought it there “last week”. However, my district manager took over, giving her $15 out of the drawer and bidding her a nice day. When I lividly demanded to know why, he explained that the company’s research had revealed that, when you factor in the people who call corporate headquarters to complain, most of whom get issued gift certificates after using up the paid time of a customer service operator, it’s cheaper for the company to give people whatever they demand right from the start, below a certain dollar value.

So, we give people what they want when they make enough of a fuss, because it’s easy and expedient. Is it any wonder that this is the same way children are being raised? If kids are being spoiled by getting what they want too much of the time and crying until their demands are met, isn’t that just a natural result of adults being spoiled in the same way?

This situation is ultimately a byproduct of capitalism. Competition leads to each business trying to make its customers happier than the other guys, earning them more repeat business. Over the last half-century, this has escalated to more concessions and more amenities being made to consumers, and the whole “The customer is always right” bullshit. Americans have become addicted to their own self-interest, and these companies are enablers.

There are signs that some companies may be backing away from this philosophy a bit, and to me this is like a faint but shining ray of hope. Personally, I think as long as we cultivate this society where “the customer is always right” in which people are told to expect everything their heart desires, that attitude is going to filter down to children, and I’m going to continue to see weak-kneed parents blinking in the face of the slightest fuss from their own kids. If you’re going to teach your own kids that way, fine…just don’t leave their favorite toy out in the open when I’ve got a baseball bat.