One of my family members and her husband are involved in a small store venture of sorts.

They sell consignment clothing, odds and ends, crafts and tobacco, not necessarily in that order.

Keeping that in mind, let me also note that they have another couple that are their partners in the business. Now that you have the background, enter the main character in this story. The partners have a young boy, circa three years old, who may be the least well behaved young man on earth. Usually I have twinges of nervous breakdown after spending no more than two minutes with the lad, who is seldom any place longer than that.

Don't get me wrong. I love children and I really enjoy outgoing kids. But this boy is ‘special.'

The other day I was in the store and personally watched him tear several changes of clothes off the racks, pick up and run with an expensive item that one of my friends left there to sell and also hit his parents and offer sweet nothings like "I hate you," and "You're stupid."

While these cute Dr. Spock books might envision a child who needs to ‘explore his inner self for the love and devotion that necessarily abides there,' I personally want to explore his backside with a keen hickory.

The lad isn't really to blame, though. He is the product of lackadaisical parenting, pure and simple. His parents do not care if he is obnoxious, rude, damaging or ignorant. They simply let him do as he chooses when he chooses, leaving the parenting up to those who choose to protect themselves or personal property. He once tried to bash my toes with a tire tool for entertainment. I caught him in a nick of time. Granted, he is a small boy, but I also have small toes, you know.

Needless to say, when I saw him running with the expensive item, I pointed that fact out to my family member, who in turn pointed it out to the mother, who in turn told the boy to lay down the radio. "No, stupid," he said. Realizing that my original message was lost somewhere in the bureaucracy, I took another approach. I took the item from the boy (which I had suggested my friend take to the store to sell), and put it out of reach. The boy didn't really care, he had already discovered that a jump rope could be used to knock clothes from a rack. On the other hand, the boy's mother and her husband looked incredulous and slightly offended. "If he broke it, I would have paid for it," she said.

Neither really said much more, but I could tell they wanted to. In a way, I was looking forward to the opportunity to share a few details on my own. But I opted for silence as well. About five minutes prior, her husband was asking me for advice on where to get cheap tires to put on his truck before it was repossessed by the finance company for not making payments. Gee, sounds like they can really afford to buy the item, doesn't it?

Maybe being around bad kids just brings out the worst in me, but I think that anyone who chooses to be such a terrible parent is at fault of some kind of a crime against humanity. I have known both this lad's parents for years and they aren't bad people by nature. But unleashing this hellion on society is a criminal act, for sure.

The question I have is, how should adults behave around a child with absolutely no supervision? It really makes me uncomfortable. Several times I have had to take dangerous objects from the boy, like once when he was trying to strike me with a tire tool. His parents pretend not to notice.

He once spat on someone's lunch for fun. Nothing was done. Not my idea of a fun store visit. And they wonder why they don't get much business. It ain't the economy, honey.

If the lad and his lazy parents bother me so much that I avoid visiting the store to keep from being around them, how might other customers be affected?

It reminds me of a story an old mountain man shared with me about a family cookout he was invited to in the flat lands. He was there for a couple hours and a five-year-old boy came up and hit him a good lick between the legs with a big stick and laughed. After recovering for a few minutes, he found the child again and took him by the shirt and said, "Take me to your daddy." The child obliged. The mountaineer then punched the father in the mouth, knocking out two of his teeth. "Teach your boy some manners," the old fellow told him and then walked out. I wonder if anything changed after he lost his teeth? Even that lesson probably escaped him, just like the obvious parallel between his parenting and his child's actions.

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