Not isolated, but until a child is old enough to adhere to certain standards they should not be present at certain events. Do you think it is appropriate to bring a 3 year old to see Saving Private Ryan? Do you believe it is appropriate to bring a 5 year old to a performance by the Dallas Symphony?
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Children don’t really bother me and I’m not a hard ass about this subject. I don’t get instantly angry when I hear a child while I’m eating or even at a movie theater. If I go to an expensive restaurant like III Forks in Dallas then I am not only paying for my meal but I am paying for the service and the atmosphere. Since I’m paying about $100 bucks for me and a date I’ll sure as hell complain if there are rowdy children or adults for that matter.
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Or if the child is ruining the symphony, movie, play, or event for the adults around them.
There are some places where adults shouldn’t have to expereicne the noise or activity of children. There is nothing wrong with having areas of society where children are not welcome.
I think some segments of society are too kid-unfriendly and others are too kid-friendly. This issue tends to polarise people.
It’s behaviour that matters to me, not the age of people around me. I don’t want to hear someone screaming in a movie theatre. If it’s an adult, it’s very disturbing, if it’s a child it’s extremely irritating. I don’t want people running around in an upscale restaurant, if it’s an adult, they’d be asked to leave and I expect the same for children.
Children need to be taught how to behave in society and the only way this can be done is by responsible parenting and practice. They need to go out and practice their good behaviour in public. It’s the parent’s job to gauge when they are ready for what level of behaviour and adjust their outings to the child’s abilities or get a sitter. Good parents do this. Bad parents don’t.
About the whole ‘it takes a village’ thing. Some parents want the village experience, others don’t. There is no way in the world I’m going to be a ‘villager’ and help you with your child, when every second person is going to scream at me for looking at thier kid sideways. Besides, I don’t know what would or wouldn’t help your child. I think the ‘village’ proponents need to realise that many other parents are anti-village, and so the village is unsure what the new rules are. From what I’ve seen, a parent is an island, the sole authority for their child and nobody else dare presume otherwise. Interesting to see another side to it, I don’t hear much from the pro-villagers where I live.
Last night my husband and I went out for a no-kids dinner at Benihana. (By no-kids, I mean our kids.) There were childrren in the restaurant. The family sitting with us had a 10 year old girl and an 8 year old boy. Behind us, a family was celebrating their oldest kids’ 10th birthday. All well and fine. The kids were well-behaved, didn’t bother us a bit.
After dinner we sat in the bar to have our ice cream so that dh could smoke. There were two or three littel girls (it was dark, but they seemed about 7ish) running around, yelling, and just generally playing in the bar. THAT was obnoxious.
IMHO, there is a vast difference between a child and an ill-behaved child. Children make a bit of noise. They are happy, they talk and laugh. Especially when getting to do something fun like see a movie or go out to dinner. Anyone who is bothered by this is a wretched old fool.
Ill-behaved children are very loud, they run indoors, they yell, they play with food. Those are the ones that should be kept home, along with their idiot parents.
Ok, we’re talking about fundamentally different things then. The 3 year old who smiles at me isn’t an issue. The 6 year old who stands there and tugs on my sleeve and tries to make me listen to her story about her goldfish 43 times in arow while I’m in line to get on the bus, on the other hand? Ignoring her is the nice reaction.
Or a nine hour plane flight, for that matter. I left my flight to Paris with a roaring headache due to two small children who ran up and down the aisle, shrieking, for hours. I finally spoke to the flight attendant, saying that the children really ought to be in their seats (they had knocked into me several times) because if we hit turbulence, they could be injured, and the noise was very disturbing. The look she gave me was poisonous.
I understand that some families may need to move overseas, and in some circumstances, a long flight might be necesary, but I overheard the parents say that this was a vacation. A nine hour plane ride with two children under five years old? They seemed to have brought no toys or games to keep the kids occupied, and seemed to have no problem with their children disturbing an entire plane full of people who were trying to sleep.
Some parents seem to utterly ignore their children, no matter how badly they are behaving, but will attack a stranger who reproves them. I was cussed-out by an enraged mother for reprimending a child who kicked me while turning cartwheels in a grocery store. When I said, “Don’t do that!” to a little by who was beating the stuffing out of his screaming little sister in a doctor’s waiting room, the mother looked up from her magazine long enough to tell me, in quite colorful language, to mind my own buisness.
I have no problem with well behaved children (or adults, for that matter) in any situation, but since a good deal of parents seem uninterested in monitoring their children’s behavior, perhaps some places should be child-free.
That’s a good point. I think, as others have said, it’s a result of a general trend of children being seen more as the responsibility of their parents as opposed to the “village”.
Goo and Lissa nailed it exactly. This “it takes a village” thing makes a nice sound bite but not much else.
It doesn’t take a village to raise a child, it takes a parent. The village can play a supporting role but if the parent isn’t going to provide the necessary discipline, there’s no way the village can.
I’m almost always very tolerant of young children in “adult” situations so long as the parents are making a good faith effort to teach them how to behave properly. Everybody has to learn sometime and it is part of everyone’s job to help socialize the next generation. What I can’t tolerate is when parents let their kids run completely wild because “they’re only children.”
Bringing children to places that are inappropriate for them is a different thing entirely. This isn’t about socializing the next generation, it’s about self-centered pigs disguised as parents who couldn’t care less about anyone except themselves. When you bring an eight-month-old baby to the symphony it’s because you are a selfish jerk. Period.
The idea that “Child noises are a part of life.” Is ridiculous. Sure they are, if you’re taking a walk in the park. They’re not, however, if you are going to the symphony, or non-child-centered film or to an expensive restaurant, etc. etc. Drunken singing is a part of life if you hang out in Irish pubs but that doesn’t mean everyone ought to put up with you belting one out at the Ritz.
In one of its cases striking down the idea of censorship to protect children, the U.S. Supreme Court observed that it was unacceptable to limit adults to what might be suitable for children. That same reasoning applies here. Not everyplace can or should be McDonalds or the Saturday afternoon matinee of Harry Potter or even the grocery store. Some spaces are and should be reserved for adults. After all, you’ve got to give them some incentive to grow up.
OH! Them’s fightin’ words! What kind of fruitcake do you have to be to say something like that to Texans ferchrissake? It wasn’t all that long ago that “he needed killin’” was a valid defense in our courts, and some of those judges are probably still around. Now which pocket of my tux did I leave my six-gun in…
I feel like my words are being twisted. Believing that “it takes a village” doesn’t mean I am absolving myself of my responsibility to raise a decent human being. I get that. I’m proud to take on that role, difficult as it sometimes is. But I feel it would be an easier goal to fulfill if more of the people around me cared about the development needs of children and were tolerant of the struggles kids face in figuring out the world (and that parents face in trying to do a good job).
And believe me, people do help. My coworkers are very kind to my son if he stops by to see where Mommy is when he’s at daycare. I’ve had waitresses who treat him very respectfully and compliment him when he’s being well-behaved. I’ve had staff go out of their way to show him neat things at the pet store. Our neighbors speak to him nicely. Through them my son is learning that the world is a good place, that people should be civil to one another, that it’s nice to meet people, etc. He’s learning about manners and generosity and patience. I can teach him about those things, but it’s the people in my community who are kind to him that reinforce those concepts in a very real way.
This is only part of what I mean by the “sound bite” of “it takes a village;” it’s not easy for me to articulate fully. But I am not at my best as a parent when I have to negotiate an environment that expresses open (and also subtle) hostility to children, and it doesn’t help my son’s concept of community and civility when it’s made clear to him that he is unwelcome and unvalued.
