Am I allowed to point out to a stranger his role as a father?
"Recently at a playground, I watched a little girl patiently waiting for her dad to help her climb a rung. But he ignored his child, simply standing there, staring incessantly at his smartphone. The thought occurred to me to point this out to the father—but I didn't want to. Finally, the father turned his attention to his child, helped her climb a rung on the climbing frame—and that was it! The child was placed in the stroller, and the father pushed the stroller away, amid the little girl's crying protests. I was sorry I hadn't intervened. Would it have been intrusive of me to make it clear to the father that his child needed him?" Melanie E., Riemerling
Of course, you can't help but feel sorry for the girl. You see it all the time: children sitting alone in their strollers while the parent pushing them stares at their phone. Or families with slightly older children sitting silently at a table in a restaurant, each looking at their screen. Psychotherapist Esther Perel speaks of "ambiguous loss" in this context. You're together, but still lonely because your phone screen consumes you, or even everyone else. I even feel sorry for dogs. When they walk all alone on a leash, not fully understanding the slow pace because the person at the other end of the leash is absentmindedly staring at their phone.
It's possible, however, that the situation you observed was different. Perhaps this man's mother had just died, and he'd just found out and was now trying to book a train back to his home village as quickly as possible while also somehow arranging childcare. Or the little girl was an absolute terror who had already drowned the budgies that morning and hit her newborn sibling on the head, so that her father's withdrawal of affection was now part of a parenting program thoroughly discussed with educators. Or he was just searching online for places where children could be put up for adoption to vent his anger. What do we know?! In any case, I think parents shouldn't be interfered with as long as they're not doing anything truly bad, like hitting their child. Perhaps you could have helped the girl briefly in this situation. But you can't make a rule out of that either. You didn't intervene; it must have been the right thing to do at the time; now let it go.
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