As someone who does not have children, I still understand that they get hot and tired and cranky just like I do
. I can usually tell if a child is getting upset because they are tired, or they aren't feeling well, and I just look the other way. I can also usually tell if they're throwing a tantrum to get attention. In those cases, I look to see how the parent is handling the situation. If it looks like they are at least attempting to contain the tantrum, then I have no problems. To be honest, the ones I really hate are the parents who get right up in their kids faces and yell at them about how they spent x amount of money to come to WDW so they better just shut up and have fun
! I can't tell you how many times I've seen that happen
.
My parents raised us with the fact that if we misbehaved
for no reason, we would leave whereever we were - a store, a park, or even WDW. We knew they meant it, because they followed through. I don't recall them ever having to correct our behavior at WDW, although I can remember Mom leaving a full cart of groceries at the store and taking us home one day (I don't remember what we did though . . . .). While I agree that "kids will be kids" it's how the adults handle it that matters.
It's like my first flight to the UK. There was a little girl, maybe 18 months, who was fine on the ground, but about halfway through take off she let out a scream and then cried at the top of her lungs for a good hour or more. You could tell the child was in agony over something, I'm assuming her ears, and the mom was trying to soothe her. A lot of people would have come to a forum like this and posted a scathing report about the child who wouldn't stop screaming. But in this case, you could tell there was something major going on, and you really felt sorry for both the child and the mother. Sure, it was annoying - but the point is, it wasn't deliberate.
On the other hand, there was the toddler, maybe 4 years old, at the Concourse Steakhouse who got under the table and was head-butting the table and screaming at the top of his lungs. The parents sat there saying in a sing-song kind of voice "stop that right now Johnny", "if you don't stop that, we'll have to go back to the room", "don't do that Johnny", and they just kept saying those things over and over for the entire duration of their meal. At no point did they actually do anything about the fact that their child was creating a major disturbance in the restaurant. They didn't leave the restaurant even for a small "time out" to show they meant business. In that case, there were a lot of us, including other families with children, who were more than a little annoyed.