Remove the TEN-YEAR-OLD from the carriage, please

[shanarocks]

I'm not going to lie, I'll let my 8 yr old ride on the grocery cart but that's only when it's late and she's tired. She weights all of 40lbs and looks like she's 5. I have small children. She doesn't stand up or mess around. She sits there and just talks to me the whole time.

[Shpepper]

I am one who does put a 7 year old in the shopping cart. He is required to sit at the back by the push handle. However I do have a good reason for having him in the cart. He has behavior issues and impulse control issues and has been known to slip a hand in stores and run into the back room areas and even to kick employees of the store. The best way for me to get what i need done is to put him in the cart and work around him. If we are doing a big shop, then he gets his own cart. In the cart is usually a last resort and we do often try to have him walk, but keeping in mind his safety as well as the safety of other people, sometimes I just have to err on the side of putting his behind in a shopping cart.

I do have to say that I would not react well to someone walking up to him and calling him names or being rude because he is in the cart. That would allow a gush of pissed of parent language and telling off of others . You never know someones story and the reasons that they do things.. Please think before you speak

[downforit2008]

When I was four, I stopped riding in the grocery cart. Makes me feel disgruntled to see so many grown-ass kids still trying to ride in the shopping carts, or even worse, trying to hijack the electric carts for the truly handicapped just so they can play bumper cars in the aisles. Yeah, thanks a lot for your stupid games of playing chicken, you little chicken sh*ts. You just broke one of the electric carts and they cost a FORTUNE to fix, and even LONGER for the store to get around to doing it because the manager is too damn cheap to want the money to fix it to come out of the store's operating budget.

And all because of a couple of stupid ass kids who wanted to have some fun. And might I add...in the middle of a school day???

[Trixie]

Had a mother just the other day with gonna say an 8 year old girl in her cart. Now our carts are smaller than your regular grocery cart. The kid was slumped down playing on the mom's phone and she couldn't even get the stuff back in the cart. She was trying to stick stuff in around the kid. It was clearance wrapping paper but still she did have other items that should've been put where the kid was.

[EricKei]

He leaned the wrong way and the cart flipped over, spilling him onto the hard floor. He wasn't hurt, luckily, just scared enough to know not to do that again.

This is exactly what scares me about bigger kids getting into the "seat" on a cart -- it's easy for the thing to become unbalanced.

The ones I wonder about are the ones who are pushing a stroller filled with shopping bags and carrying their kid. Unclear on the concept?

Easy way to hide items they don't exactly plan to pay for down at the bottom

[Deevil]

The ones I wonder about are the ones who are pushing a stroller filled with shopping bags and carrying their kid. Unclear on the concept?

That one I can understand. If a toddler is insistent on "Up! Up! UP!!!!", it's easier for everybody in earshot to carry the kiddo instead of leaving him/her in the stroller. And since toddlers can be both squirmy and heavy, putting the bags in the stroller is a wise idea.

[MoonCat]

The ones I wonder about are the ones who are pushing a stroller filled with shopping bags and carrying their kid. Unclear on the concept?

[Monterey Jack]

For Christ's sake...I saw a kid in a cart today, she must have been TWELVE, her legs folded under her Indian-style just to fit. If I had been pushed around in a shopping cart at that age, and had anyone I knew from school seen me, I would have been MERCILESSLY teased and tormented about it for months. What are these parents THINKING?!

[mathnerd]

A friend of mine probably got some weird looks when her son was a toddler. My friend is 5'11" and the shortest member of her family. Her husband, also the shortest member of his family, is 6'5". When their son was two, he was the same height as my oldest child, who was 7 years old (and in the 50th percentile for height, so neither short nor tall.). Yes, my friend still used a stroller for her two year old, even though he looked like he was closer to 7 or 8.

[emax4]

Id be tempted to look at the kid in the stroller and say, "my, youre an elephant toddler, arent you..."

[pudddykat]

I have an autistic nephew who turned 9 in October. For trips to Costco he gets to ride in his own cart that someone pushes and we push a second cart for the groceries. Now that his grandparents (they are raising him and his older sister) have respite care they don't have to bring him so often. He has his noise filtering head phones on and plays on his iPad. Those carts are huge and it makes the trip easier for everyone. He walks fine otherwise and as long as he wears his headphones in noisy places he does well. He's a goofy cuddly kid and is learning and improving under his grandparents loving hands.

[Kit-Ginevra]

If the store is empty and there is no one else around,I have been known on occasion to run along with the trolley and then launch into the air with a wild Wheee! down the aisle...

[Deserted]

Wait, scratch that...there isn't any specific warning to not allow kids to ride under the carts. Plenty to not allow kids above a certain age/weight to ride inside, but none to tell parents to keep kids out from under them. Talk about a lawsuit waiting to happen...

I used to sometimes take my nephews (who were 6-8 at the time) along on grocery runs, and I'd often allow them to ride in the bottom shelf thing of a shopping cart for short periods of time (handful of seconds) because they really got a kick out of it -- but I'm willing to admit that, had they been hurt, it would have (probably) been my fault, not the store's or anyone else's.

[wolfie]

Wait, scratch that...there isn't any specific warning to not allow kids to ride under the carts. Plenty to not allow kids above a certain age/weight to ride inside, but none to tell parents to keep kids out from under them. Talk about a lawsuit waiting to happen...

Rather than try to do an exhaustive list (where some idiot would find a location not on the list, their kid gets hurt, and they sue), why not have a specific instruction "Children are not to ride in the cart EXCEPT in the provided seating area"?

[Monterey Jack]

Or riding underneath the cart, which always infuriates me. It's not only common sense, but it's also store policy (and even illustrated on the carts themselves )

Wait, scratch that...there isn't any specific warning to not allow kids to ride under the carts. Plenty to not allow kids above a certain age/weight to ride inside, but none to tell parents to keep kids out from under them. Talk about a lawsuit waiting to happen...