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>Spoken like someone who either doesn’t have kids, or at least has easier ones than mine.

I do actually and in particular a little one with autism, making part of the process for educating on certain things more difficult than average, but despite being far from parent of the year, I manage and there are things that work.

>You think you’re just going to explain to a four year old the rules about ice cream and they’ll just be like “you’re right daddy. I forgot we had ice cream from the truck yesterday. I’ll grab some carrot sticks instead”?

Well, yeah. That's what parenting is partly about. Establish limits or conduct through repeated insistence on certain rules and lessons to be learned learned, instead of trying to make complaints against others causing a minor inconvenience with their own source of making a living or food choices you don't seem to like.

Parenting isn't easy and each case is different, but if something as minor as a few minutes of ice cream truck marketing is too much to handle with your kids, blaming others isn't your solution to that problem.

And please, the whole ethics thing you describe is just absurd in this context. A jingling ice cream truck, which kids love and which hardly sells something terrible or deceptive, is far from the kind of manipulative marketing you're contriving here. It's just a basic and basically harmless reality: Kids love ice cream, and there's nothing wrong with someone selling a bit of it to them. You're creating an ethical knot that doesn't have any good reason for existing in a normal world.

Example: Every time I take mine home from school, we pass by a Dairy Queen that's on the route home. Oops, and guess what gets asked for each day that this happens? Some days I say sure, and we go get a cone or blizzard. Other days, it's a firm no, and that's that. Repeat insistence made this work out okay. And I don't blame the DQ for anything, even though this particular branch happens to also use music to market its very visible presence.

>Here’s a better question before you call me a Karen: given that most people have freezers, who exactly benefits from daily ice cream truck visits? Not the parents, for reasons above. The kids find it frustrating too. The fact that they had ice cream yesterday usually doesn’t ease their disappointment.

Totally subjective opinions of your own, and in no way justifying getting so annoyed that you want to ban these things, as you seem to. Again, how about not converting your personal dislikes of minor things into trying to shut those things down.



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