'Don't talk to strangers' is lesson that goes unheeded

My 4-year-old son, Braden, would get high marks for his social skills, if he was to receive a grade for them, but he is a complete failure when it comes to the “don’t talk to strangers” lesson.
Braden loves to talk to anyone that will listen. If you have ears – heck, even if you don’t and even if you’re an animal or something that’s non-human – he’ll talk to you.
To people at the park: “Do you want to play with me?”
To people at the grocery store: “Hey, we’re getting Corn Pops. Do you want to come to my house and have some with me?”
To people on walking trails: “Where are you walking to? Can I pet your dog? I saw a dead fish.”
To the two little girls he encountered last week: “Hi. What’s your name? I’m Braden.”
Everybody except the little girls responded to him. Obviously, they knew better than to talk to a stranger, but judging by their giggles to each other they were probably just playing hard to get. Even at such young ages, girls know the rules of the game.
This habit of talking to strangers is especially annoying when I’m going through a bank or restaurant drive-thru. He always has to tell the bank teller he wants a sucker, even when I tell him he’ll only get one based on how quiet he is, and he always tries to order his own food at restaurant drive-thrus.
When he tried to order chocolate milk, chicken nuggets and French fries from the lady in the drive-thru ticket window at Hartman Creek State Park last weekend, she found it amusing. I chuckled, too, but I didn’t find it as funny when I actually attempted to order fast food at a restaurant and motor mouth behind me spoke as I spoke, confusing the person taking my order. Personally, I have a hard enough time giving an order without his help – my wife says I make ordering food much more complicated than it should be – so I can do without his added commentary.
The strangers whom Braden talks to usually find him adorable, as most people like the charm a 4-year-old presents. I’ll admit it’s cute sometimes, but most of the time it puts me in an uncomfortable position.
Why? Because I’d rather not talk to strangers. I admit it; my social skills aren’t on par with his. I’m perfectly happy not talking to people, but he puts me in a position where I need to talk with them if he talks to them first.
My wife and I are constantly telling him he shouldn’t talk to strangers, which we define as people whose names he doesn’t know. If he needs to ask for a name, we tell him, that person is a stranger.
Granted, some of these people aren’t really strangers – people like bank tellers and restaurant workers – but we figure he’ll learn the difference when we tell him who it is okay to talk to after he stops talking to all strangers.
But getting to this lesson may take awhile as he keeps talking to strangers. “But they are nice strangers,” he’ll tell us after we lecture him for talking to someone he shouldn’t talk to.
“Not all strangers are going to be nice like that,” we’ll tell him, although throughout all of his encounters with strangers he’s never met a bad one.
Braden’s disposition to talk to anybody makes me wonder how the generations before us kept their children to be “seen and not heard.” My child, if he had been born 75 years earlier, probably would have been shunned by his family and others, even at the tender age of 4.
My wife and I aren’t about to shun him (by the way, it sounds pretty cool to say you’re going to shun someone, so I might consider placing this punishment on someone other than a close family member), but maybe we’ll hire someone to play the role of a “bad stranger” to scare some sense into him.
This person could roar like a lion when he attempts to talk to him or her. It might set him right, although I doubt it. He’d probably find it funny and ask the person to do it again, while commenting that the person needs to put a little more “roar” into it to make it even scarier, while telling other strangers around him they should join in, making for a roaring chorus that will provide him with plenty of amusement.
I guess I can only hope his rhetorical skills will serve him well later in life. Probably not, as he’ll use it to become a politician or some other person full of a lot to say with little substance behind it.