I like how I’m singled out for three things. That barely makes a list. A pit thread. So, does everyone who replied to that thread have a long list of really rude things that aren’t rude? :rolleyes: You don’t have to like me, but honestly by the logic you’re using you probably don’t like most other Dopers.
Nope, three things is a list. Just ask Opal.
Just barely. Notice how the things you said came from different sources, two of them didn’t even come from this thread. If you have problem with me, I don’t care. Maybe I don’t like you. Seriously, if you have “beef” with me because I’m not kissing Opal’s ass in ANOTHER thread, take it to burger king. I don’t have time for this.
Bwah??
It seems that “children should be seen and not heard” has turned into “children shouldn’t be seen OR heard,” for some people.
I would kill for Burger King right about now.
You can’t take kids to Burger King.
Just read the whole thread because I am bored and cannot sleep.
I grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC. Various school trips took us to museums ( I remember one teacher panicking at the room of nudes at a Matisse exhibit). Mom took us to even more museums. I remember being 8 or so and taken to a once in a lifetime touring Fabrege exhibit. The only time I recall being noisy was upon viewing mummies. I thought that it was wrong to dig them up and display them naked for tourists. Most science and history museums are set up with kids in mind. Art museums are not but I don’t see why they need to be child free zones.
The next time my now ten year old niece visits me in Philadelphia, we will probably go to the art museum. I love Van Gogh but once you grasp that his View From The Asylum Window and Sunflowers are sad, you’ve understood most of the painting.
With theater or concerts, it depends. When I saw Midsummer Night’s Dream in Clarke Park, many people brought children and some brought dogs. I remember hearing one kid say to his mom “He’s a bad lion.” and mom explaining “He’s supposed to be a bad lion.” . But this was a free performance in a park. If I were paying for a show, I expect silence.
As for planes, some kids just cry. I wouldn’t really complain. I’d just sit there, judging the parents based on how they were dealing (or not dealing) with it.
At a Dopefest, I want kids there very much. I get to ask them questions and do magic tricks and teach them things. But about halfway through, they and all the vanilla adults should disappear so the orgy can begin.
Finally, an invitation should be wholly unambiguous. If I am unsure who is invited, it is my responsibility to contact the host and ask.
ETA- I generally love kids and have tried a career as a clown. I still think there are some places no child belongs.
Those places are?
certain plays and performances and orgies. I think that’s it.
Yes.
Good. Some folks take Disneyland (Disney period) way too seriously. Forget it’s for kids.
I tend to categorize those folks into the “child as accessory” category. It’s sad, but it’s the impression that they give me because they pay no more attention to their child than they do their purse.
The strategy mentioned above is a great one for teaching expected roles and behaviors. Children don’t come pre-trained and need to learn how to behave in small, manageable steps; like everything else, good manners comes with practice. You have to start at home and then build up to being able to go to the fancier and more adult places by building those good behaviors incrementally. You can’t take a kid who won’t stop throwing their food across the table or sit in their seat at home to a restaurant and expect them to behave better than they do at home-- they don’t have any expectations of the fact that they’re supposed to behave themselves, and going to new/unusual places is exciting for most children.
This issue is mostly about awareness of one’s surroundings. I’m not a parent, but I do have dogs that I occasionally take with me to places. I’m working on being able to take them with me to the downtown area where it’s common to take dogs with you to restaurant patios, but that won’t happen until they’re trained well enough to understand that they can’t mill about and bother people. I also see a lot of folks sans children that are oblivious to their surroundings-- standing in major pathways while texting, eating in places where food is not welcome (hello libraries and museums with posted rules!), talking loudly in quiet places and grousing at their fellow mankind for daring to exist (sadly, some of the local retirees think that folks under the retirement age shouldn’t exist). All of these expected behaviors and the subsequent rule breaking is all about context-- I don’t care if you talk loudly at an arts and crafts fair, but you better shut the hell up if we’re in a big, echo-prone museum and there are others trying to contemplate the objects in front of them.
It varies heavily, but a lot of the folks who don’t want others telling their kid how to behave do the same thing with actual authority figures, including but not restricted to teachers, managers, and folks who run the venues that their children are unattended in. Most parents are good about keeping the kids in tow and behaved, but some parents aren’t in tune with managing their child’s behavior or schedules in a way that prevents tantrums. When I worked in the public library, I learned really quickly what time of day was most prone to meltdowns to the point where I’d look at the clock and say “Oh, it must be lunchtime/naptime/dinnertime/bedtime for [squalling child]” instead of getting angry about it. Sure, it sucked and there was very little I could do about it unless it got out of hand, but this mostly happened up in the Children’s room where some loud voices were occasionally part of the regular business. These days, I shush people far more than I ever thought I would because the school I work in does study hall in the library-- we have very different expectations because it’s supposed to be a quiet area to do work and not a meeting place as well.
I have a story about adult parties from the past year that demonstrates some cluelessness on the part of one couple: One of my coworkers hosted a holiday party and gave out invites that named the party as something akin to “hullabaloo at the Hendersons” and stated that the party started after 9pm. Now, this coworker has several children, all of whom were shuttled off-site to babysitters and other folks’ houses so that we could all be adults enjoying alcohol in each other’s company. One set of guests came along with a three year old in tow around 10pm, well after one of the hosts and many of the guests had imbibed more alcohol than can be consumed without going beyond the “merely tipsy” point. The host had made a comment about the parents not bringing their child along and going home, and the guest got very clearly upset about it-- “why wouldn’t her child be welcome at any party?” combined with “I’m scared for my safety” complaints ensued from said guest. My husband and I expressed two different reactions to this: he commented with “[host] is obviously very drunk and the filter between what he’s thinking and what he wants to say is broken”, while I had mentioned to her that this was meant to be an adult party, hence the late starting time and complete absence of host’s children. Both were a fact at the time, but definitely meant to do two very different things; my husband went with being non-threatening and reassuring that the less-than-tactful thought was not meant to be a threat to her safety, and I, being female, reminded her of some apparently subtle social rules that she had forgotten in the three years since becoming a mother. Not every party is family friendly, even if the folks hosting it have kids and are hosting it in their own home, so it’s best to check beforehand just in case.
Nope. You are missing my point.
‘My way’ isn’t intended to " to always leave it open for other people to fill in their own assumptions that aren’t specifically ruled out". ‘My way’ is intended to avoid embarrasment and hurt feelings on the part of one’s guests.
Knowing that in the real world many people do not understand or follow the conventions, ‘my way’ is designed to avoid taking those people by surprise.
In reality, we all know that many people do take their kids along when invited to a traditional family-type event. That is because taking the family along is, well, traditional at such events.
If you want to stop them, it just makes sense to inform them of this fact in a way that you know they will understand.
On the other hand, if you want to humiliate them and sneer at their ignorance of the conventions, you can do that, too. But it strikes me that the first rule of politeness is to put others at their ease, not to be merely correct.
Reminds me of an anecdote told of Queen Victoria. She had some visitors from the Indian subcontinent to a formal dinner, and before each guest was set a finger-bowl. The Indian guests, not knowing what that was, drank the lemon-water. Of course, this was a huge mistake in ediquette, and the Queen’s courtiers were inclined to snicker: but the Queen, more graciously, drank her own finger-bowl water instead.
This isn’t ‘enabling those folks to do whatever they want at the table’ any more that ‘my way’ is designed to leave it open to everyone to bring their dentist or their pet tarantula or whatever.
Your finger bowl story doesn’t illustrate your point at all. The guests were ignorant of proper social convention and the hostess, AFTER the guests made a mistake, pretended like it was ok. Just as most hosts do when people bring uninvited guests - “Oh of course it’s ok that you brought little Johnny!” when it may not have been ok at all.
What you’re saying is that when the finger bowls came out, she should have interrupted the flow of the event to say, “Please don’t drink the finger bowls.”
No, the point is to put others at their ease, however you can do it.
The point to the anecdote was that the Queen was accomodating others rather than standing on her correct views, which would humiliate others.
The finger-bowls thing is something the Queen could be expected not to have anticipated. The invitations thing is something anyone can reasonably anticipate - look at this very thread. Where one can reasonably anticipate a misunderstanding, the best thing is to eliminate it in advance. If the Queen knew in advance her Indian guests would not understand the finger-bowl thing, better to not have the finger bowls, or slip the guests the word in advance.
With kids, you cannot rely on the hosts and all the guests simply tolerating the presence of kids (and indeed, the anecdote above mine indicates that some don’t even try - really, a host making drunken threats to a guest? I can’t imagine anything worse). Why not make sure the bad stuff doesn’t happen?
You indicate your involvement in this thread as proof that we should anticipate people not understanding how to read an invitation, but disregard your own anecdote as proof that she could have anticipated foreign guests not understanding finger bowls? I don’t follow your logic.
My response to your example remains. Most hosts accommodate uninvited guests graciously, just as she accommodated her guests’ error. You insist that social convention should be spelled out beforehand to avoid error, which is why for your story to have any relevance, she should have specifically instructed the guests not to drink it. Which would not have guaranteed their proper usage - she would also have to tell them not to swim in it, not to pour it on their laps, not to feed it to the dog, etc. See, that’s the problem with your way - as I asked twice before to no response, where does it end? If I invite you, but tell you not to bring your kids (which I still can’t imagine how to do politely, as explained “adults only” does not always work), how do I ensure you don’t bring along someone else? How do I exclude everyone but the people explicitly named on the invitation? I know you insist that it’s only children people would assume are included, and insist on ignoring that other people assume grandkids, grown children, boyfriends, and buddies can be add-ons as well. And your insistence that there are events at which children are “traditionally expected” is also refuted by the existence of this thread, by the way.
And in my experience, the party invitation is for little Suzy, who will of course be dropped off and picked up by an adult who is not invited to and is not expected to remain at the party.
In short, you thought up a “slippery slope” argument. I seem to recall your adding your “dentist” to the list acouple of times. 
The easy refutation - which I have made several times - is to point out that these alleged other contingencies do not commonly occur among reasonable people. They are not easily forseeable.
One does not have to put that “this is a your buddy Chuck free event” or “this is a dentist-free event” because, contrary to the Slippery Slope, one does not reasonably foresee guests bringing their buddy Chuck or their dentist to (say) a wedding without asking. We know people do commonly bring young children to sich family-type events. So if you don’t want young children, discretion being the better part of valour and accomodation being the better part of politeness, it is better to specifically tell people about it.
In my experience, that depends on the host parents, who are often more than happy to have additional adult supervision and help - rather than having their home used for some free daycare for a few hours.
In short, it is a bad example.