In my opinion, playing in a cemetery is not disrespectful unless a funeral is taking place. We played in the church cemetery all the time when we were kids.
Sure, why not – as long as they’re not climbing on broken and/or open graves, or there aren’t funerals going on.
When I was little, and we lived above a funeral home, I used to play in the viewing rooms, according to my mother. While the bodies were laid out. (When no one was there, of course)
My dad was into geneology, and most of our family vacations when I was a kid involved visiting a cemetary somewhere so Dad could do research. I have good memories of my sister and I playing hide-and-seek among the grave markers. I never thought anything of it until now. I suppose people might have thought it was disrespectful. Dad was just glad we weren’t bored.
There’s a difference between playing in a cemetary, and playing on a gravestone.
The first is ok, so long as you are respectful of others’ private time - the second is NOT ok.
For my kid, I would never let her play on a gravestone, but unless it was obviously wobbly, (as many are in my local boneyard) safety wouldn’t occur to me. I should point out that in my hometown, the graveyard is on the side of a hill, affected by recent earthquakes - it’s pretty clear that some areas are no longer safe.
At the same time, I think the family is lying - there is no way a gravestone is going to fall over if the kid is just poking his head out from behind it.
Also, if a piece of metal broke on a 100 year old gravestone while a kid was climbing on it, it’s pretty hard to see where is the liability. Kid’s climbing on a 100 year old gravestone, and being allowed to do so by parents doesn’t strike me as being in any way a foreseeable risk.
We played in a cemetery all the time when I was a kid. It was a very old cemetery, with no new graves, and with mostly the short kind of headstones.
Heck, our parish priest would send us out to the cemetery and tell us to play a game that we came up with that was a little bit like tag (but you could be “safe” from tagging if you were touching specific headstones).
At least, they’ll be able to save on transportation costs…
It would depend on the gravestone. A stranger’s gravestone, absolutely no, not ever, utterly disrespectful, and any of my nephews or nieces caught doing so would get the beating of their lives. However, there are a small number among my deceased friends and acquaintances who made it known before their death that they would like child visitors playing at and around their grave sites. In those cases the deceased wishes are honored and my only concern is being certain the child is not doing anything that could lead to injury.
Like several others here, I grew up by a cemetery and played there all the time as a child. Also like others, we were always told to be quiet when there was a funeral going on (our house was across the street). However, it was a large, relatively safe place and children were welcome, at least in our small town. There was never any remarks made about it being disrespectful and we were never fussed at by any neighbor, or any person visiting the graveyard, ever. I will also mention that we had enough sense not to climb on tombstones, new or old.
I actually have very sweet memories of this cemetery, and now that I’m older I know quite a few people whose remains are there now. I can’t imagine any of them minding the children of their family and friends playing nearby.
While my initial though was “disrespectful”, upon consideration I can’t think of anything I’d like better as a lonely dead person than to have a marker that compels kids, adults even, to climb, cluster, gather around me whenever they feel like it. I’m with Hermitian, the more the merrier. Make my headstone a big slide, teeter-tooter, loveseat, anything that welcomes company.
Might I suggest “Rest In Peace” and “Pressed In Peace”?
(Bolding mine)
This coming from lieu is the funniest thing I’ve read in awhile.
In my case, I was raised Catholic, which may have had something to do with it. We also lived for a time while I was in gradeschool on a farm that had a small family cemetery on it. The whole dont-play-in-the-graveyard thing was reinforced then.
Just a childhood hangup, but I still find it disrespectful. YMMV.
Exactly. Haven’t these kids seen the documentaries?
I think it is a little disrespectful but they are dead so, if it just me I wouldn’t care too much about kids playing on graves but I know that some people care about such things so I wouldn’t let my kids do it. If I visited my Dad’s grave only to find some kids climbing on the headstone I would be annoyed.
I don’t think it’s disrespectful to the dead people so much as the living. If someone is really upset and visiting the grave of a loved one, it’s absolutely disrespectful for a kid to be jumping all over gravestones and shrieking and running around.
That said, some of the playing described by dopers sounds like no big deal - relatively quiet and unobtrusive is no big deal, especially if no one is about. The type of play in the OP’s article, though? Climbing on a headstone? Absolutely not.
My mother has memories of tap-dancing on her great-aunt’s (?) tombstone as a child. Apparently, it both made a great sound and grossed her cousin out. Of course, this is in the 40s in a small town where the cemetery is right next to the church that everyone goes to every week; the cemetery was an everyday place, not a special occasion place.
I think that with my own kids, I’d be more inclined to worry about them damaging things than offending others or hurting themselves.
My friend and I, and her youngsters used to picnic on the grave of another friend’s mother, who was with us. It was her idea, she wanted to visit her Mom, and proposed a picnic.The children played about, ran between the rows, etc. It was a beautiful spring day, and quiet in the midst of a busy city, quite lovely really. We wouldn’t have let them climb on the stones, or damage anything. We all enjoyed it so much, we made it an annual thing for a few years there.
Supervised, I don’t see a problem. It never even occurred to any of the three of us!
This exactly.
My God, Did you let the video play? This news channel is like from a Stephen King town in Maine.
Kid crushed by tombstone.
Kitten half buried in cement. (kitten dies)
Another dead kid
A story about a suspect in the case of (wait for it) another dead kid.
My concern would be purely about safely and little to nothing in terms of respect. It is important to be empathetic and understand the meaning of others’ feelings concerning respect for the dead, and important to teach those concerns to your children. Having said that, I don’t think there is anything disrespectful, or inherently disrespectful, about a child playing on a symbol that the child hasn’t internalized as being something near sacred or whatever else. What I mean is that it would be difficult to argue that a kid playing on a grave is doing something inherently wrong. The rock isn’t the problem, the symbol of the rock is. I don’t give any meaning to that symbol and I wouldn’t expect my children to either. As a matter of respect to others it is reasonable to tell your children not to fool around near or on them, but I wouldn’t be angry if I caught them doing it for any other reason than it may fall on and kill them. But I don’t suspect I will be the kind of alarmist parent that will fear the death of my children during every exercise of play. This particular story is just a cautionary tale about a form of death that statistically doesn’t happen too often.
I completely reject any idea that this is inherently disrespectful and while (to a degree) I sympathize with those feelings in others, I don’t take them too seriously.
It’s been a weird week in Utah, and you didn’t even mention the woman who ate a $6000 diamond ring at Macy’s then later “retrieved it” to pawn for gambling money…
My normal reaction would be to say “No, of course not, it’s so disrespectful!” but recently I was visiting my in-laws and we took a family trip out to visit the grandmother’s grave. It was a very small cemetery in the country, it was more like a picnic than anything else, (very similar to what elbows described) and the kids were having fun like kids. I’m not sure about the “horsing around” description - I would be okay with playing, and running, but I would draw the line at climbing up on stuff. It would be more out of concern of damaging it and the general concept of “don’t climb up on stuff that wasn’t designed to be climbed up on” … if safety was a concern it would probably have more to do with my worry about falling off and breaking an arm than bringing the thing down on top of you.
Just a caveat, I’m confident that if we had arrived and there was a service in progress, or even another grieving family, the kids wouldn’t have been allowed to be as active. We were the only people there. We were in a section of about … 35 graves, most of which had family connections to my in-laws. They considered this “their” cemetery in a pretty tangible way.
I guess a lot of my answer is “it depends” on the overall tone of the cemetery visit and what is considered locally appropriate.