At what point are you allowed to tell a kid shut up in a children's movie? On the one hand, a kid could be totally obnoxious but on the other hand, it is a kids movie. Why I bring this up is because I saw Wall-E last week (just a phenomenal movie) and there was this kid sitting behind me who had to be around 4 who spent the whole movie blabbering away, kicking my chair, poking her head over hear seat and at one point ran up and down and up and down the completely empty aisle for which she sat. Her mother, as far as I could tell, did nothing much in the way of stopping her. Again, I could have said something, but on the other hand I'm watching a cartoon about one robot falling in love with another robot.

The other thing about all of this is that telling people responsible for making a lot of noise in places they shouldn't be rarely goes smoothly. Whenever you let the person know that they are in effect being obnoxious, you never hear "gosh, you are right. I'll try and be more quiet and I apologize to you and yours for ruining your experience." Instead, what you usually hear is a bunch of curses and invective thrown your way.

A friend of mine told me a story about having seats at a Shins concert. In front of her and her friends sent this dad who was there with his two teenage sons. The dad was obviously not into the music and so spent the entire concert on the phone with friends, blabbing away. When one of my friends' friends asked him, politely, to get off the phone and shut the fuck up, he got cursed at and then spent the next few minutes yelling back and forth with the dad.

Which brings up my situation because there is nothing-- nothing-- that is prone to explosion like a mother called on her parenting skills. You just do not go there. What I mean is by turning around and asking her to control her kid, you are, in effect, calling her a lousy parent who can't control her kid. And what mother wants to hear that? And it's not just on a personal level, but you are never supposed to question anybody about their parenting skills (unless their child happens to be a celebrity). It's just not allowed to say anything bad about a child and the child's mother

So I did nothing.