It's not easy for many of us to call people out when we see something inappropriate going on, but Mary Katherine Backstrom just made a great case for why we should do it anyway, Scary Mommy reports. When she was in Target, she saw some kids making fun of a man with staples in his head, a drooping eye, and cranial deformities. It looked like they were taking photos of him and using Snapchat filters to send them to their friends.
"I have a hard time sometimes accepting that I'm an adult and that I can actually be an adult in situations like this," she explained in a Facebook video. "You feel like these kids are intimidating to you. I'm just not very confident sometimes in my adulthood. But I felt like something needed to be done about this. So I set my cart aside, and when the kids checked out, I walked out and said 'Excuse me. You need to stop.' My heart was racing because I'm very non-confrontational, but anyways, I said 'You are being very cruel to that man,' and the kids stopped and they were looking at me like 'we're in trouble.' And in that moment, I realized, yes, I'm an adult. This is OK. I can take control of the situation and teach these kids a lesson."
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Then, she asked them, "How do you think he would feel if he understood that you were making fun of him?" They apologized immediately, but she didn't stop there. She asked how they were getting home, and when one said their mom was picking them up, she decided to stay and wait to let the mom know what happened. She was scared the mom would be angry with her for getting involved with the kids, but to her relief, her response was, "Thank you for telling me."
Even though she could tell this woman was a good mother, Backstrom believes anyone's kids can slip up sometimes, and it's on all of us to correct them.
"As terrified as I was, sometimes it takes a village to raise these kids," she explained. "Kids can be buttholes sometimes, but they get straightened out when their parents are listening. And then my message to y'all is, if my kids are ever in Target being buttholes or bullies or making fun of people, I hope you do the same thing. Because it's sometimes hard to hear criticism from other parents or hear that your kids are embarrassing you... but that's part of them growing up, and that's a refining process for them, and we all need to be keeping an eye on each other's kids. And I know that could've turned out badly, and I hope that if it had, I would've done the same thing over and over again."