On Children and Behavior in Public Space

H and I went to the park this afternoon, as we do with some reasonable frequency, to exercise- I do some hooping outdoors where there's actually room, and he does some sort of Tai Chi exercises. It's not unusual that we attract some looks, since he's standing very still, and I'm spinning a shiny hoop around myself in various ways. Generally, some group of children or random passerby will ask me about what I'm doing, and maybe about what he's doing, and occasionally some little girl will want to try to hooping. The last few times have been fairly uninterupted, though. (Especially in comparison to when he took out his sword and gave me a demonstration of his primary martial art- that got a number of repetitions of "Is that a real sword?".)

This afternoon, I guess we went out a bit later in the day, and it was the end of the week, or something, because we got an entire birthday party's worth of 8 year old girls first watching, then questioning both of us. They kept talking to me for quite a while, in both Hebrew and English, and I gave them some basic answers, and tried to just keep hooping, since the point of us going out to the park is to be able to work on some stuff I can't do in my living room, etc. Then they asked about what he was doing, and of course, I didn't have many answers- I'm certainly not involved in martial arts at all. So I told them what I could and asked them not to bother him. That only sort of worked- after a while, when they got bored with me, some of them started imitating and mocking him, which really irked me. He mostly ignored them, and then when he was done with a set, he talked to the girl who was left and asked her what she thought the right thing was to do if someone was staying still and had their eyes closed- should you talk to them? After she produced the correct answer of "no", he asked her to tell her friends.

WHen we were done, we went over to talk to some of the parents of these girls, to ask them to talk to their kids about behaving politely to other people minding their own business in the park. One of the mothers said sorry, then started yelling at H for yelling at the girls, because it's a public park and they can do what they want- if he wanted not to be bothered, he should do it in his own private garden. It was a pretty uncomfortable encounter- their kids behaved quite rudely, and they seemed to think that it was just fine, because it was a public park. I really don't understand this Israeli notion that rudeness is fine, as long as it's being done to someone else. I can see that the mother was feeling defensive, but really, saying 'I'm sorry, I'll have a word with them" isn't so hard- even if you don't end up following through on it. I don't see why it's reasonable to yell at someone who is pointing out that your child has offended them....