The other night, Hub and I decided to go see Mission Impossible 4 at the cinema.
There were no tickets left for the 9.30pm show. And the seats left for the 10.30pm show weren’t together. So we went to the 11.30pm show. It was rather late, but we’re on holiday so it didn’t really matter!
As we waited for the endless number of adverts to finish, a young couple arrived and sat in front of us. With them was their son. He looked as if he may have been about Vinay’s age. Possibly *slightly* older. No more than 18-20 months I’d say.
The poor child was actually very well behaved to start with. But he soon got fidgety. He cried a little. He wanted to walk around. He wanted to talk to his parents. He wanted to sleep.
His mum took him outside several times. His dad held his hand over his mouth when he cried. And at one point he smacked him lightly. At no point did they offer him something to drink or eat.
I, of course, couldn’t concentrate on the film because I was too horrified by what was going in the seats in front of me.
I have, so far, found Dubai to be very child friendly. There are children everywhere, all the time. It surprised me a lot to see children out at restaurants at 10pm for the first day or two, but I’m used to it now.
However, isn’t taking a toddler to an inappropriate movie at midnight and expecting him to be quiet absolutely ridiculous? And I suppose it’s not exactly ‘child friendly’ to smack your child.
I was absolutely livid, but there wasn’t exactly anything I could do except fume inwardly.
I think this is where cultural differences become more apparent…
The Diary of a Lagos Mum 
That’s cruel! QUite frankly that is utterly cruel!
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"><html><head><meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"></head><body>I completely agree with you. I find it so strange that no one minded or batted an eyelid. I wanted to just take that child away and hold him. <div>Empower your Business with BlackBerry?? and Mobile Solutions from Etisalat</div></body></html>
I’m literally struggling with my phone trying to comment but I HAD to say something. That is totally ridiculous, especially the smacking part! I’m all for being more child friendly – England has a long way to go – but that is just too much!You guys need to try & see the movie again :)X
I’m in complete agreement with you too. Yes, people have different parenting methods, but taking a toddler out to a loud cinema at that time of night is just awful. No wonder the poor little mite was wriggling about and crying, he’ll have been tired and wanting to sleep!He should have been tucked up in bed at that time. Not in the middle of a noisy cinema.