Stellar Parenting Skills

So, I'm waiting for the bus into school this afternoon. I cringed when I first got to the top of the bus stop because the only other adult waiting was yelling into a walkie-talkie phone. Or at least I thought it was at first, but as the conversation stretched on and on, it became obvious that he was actually using a plain old regular cellphone set to speakerphone. Which is actually kind of sad, when you think about it. Anyway, it wasn't the pseudo-walkie-talkie phone that made me want to poke this guy right in the eye.

With him was a very young child, maybe three years old at the most. We were waiting at a bus stop on the side of the street and she was, as such small toddlers are wont to do, running around getting into everything and not paying much attention to what was going on around her. And in turn, the man was not paying much attention to what she was doing at all. She climbed up on the bench and was heading for the ledge-- beyond which was a three story drop to the parking lot. Luckily, she was distracted by the arrival of a bus. Unluckily, she started heading toward said bus. Luckily, the bus pulled away before she got there. She also tried to pry gum off the bottom of the bench, peeked in the garbage can, and pressed the "Emergency" call button, prompting a police dispatcher to start yelling into the speaker "HELLO?? CAN I HELP YOU?? IS EVERYTHING OK??".

Not much of this got a reaction at all from the man, except the call button, and that was probably only because the police would (eventually) have shown up if he'd ignored that. Every few minutes, he would interrupt his oh-so-important phone call (in which he was, ironically enough, arguing about how much child support he owed) to yell things toward the little girl like: "Why you gotta be so bad?" "You always bad. Why you can't stop bein' bad?" and (my personal favorite) "You so bad, I'm gonna let someone come and take you." Dear God, is that anyway to talk to a child? Especially a young child? And let me tell you something, if you don't pay attention, she's going to end up dead under the wheels of a bus. Poor child. What chance does she have of growing up happy and healthy?