“What’s the matter with kids today and why doesn’t anyone want them around?”
Yahoo naturally goes to the extreme with their lede, but their article does illustrate an apparently growing phenomenon. And as Mark Steyn would say, it’s the Demography, Stupid. With a large dose of the “Me Decade” mentality that began with ’70s-era Boomers mixed in as well:
Even running errands with toddlers may be changing. This summer Whole Foods stores in Missouri are offering child-free shopping hours (kids are allowed inside but childcare service is available for parents who want to shop kid-free.) Meanwhile in Florida, a controversy brews over whether kids can be banned from a condominium’s outdoor area. That’s right, some people don’t even want kids outdoors.
When did kids become the equivalent of second-hand smoke? Blame a wave of childless adults with money to spare. “Empty nesters continue to wield a huge swath of discretionary spending dollars, and population dips in first-world countries mean more childless couples than ever,” writes AdWeek’s Klara.
Catering to the child-free community may be good for business but is it good for parents? It could help narrow choices and make kid-friendly environments even kid-friendlier. And let’s be honest, babies won’t miss flying first class. They won’t even remember it. But their moms and dads will.
Most parents with young children have self-imposed limits on spending and leisure. This new movement imposes limits set by the public. And the public isn’t as child-friendly as it used to be. As businesses respond to their new breed of ‘first-class’ clientele, are parents in danger of becoming second-class citizens?
Probably not, as there will be plenty of places that still cater to families with small children. But read the whole article and then explore in the comments. I’d love to know what the PJ Lifestyle readers think of this trend.
Categories: Children, Food and Drink, Travel
Did the author read the linked articles, the condominium doesn’t have a yard, just houses and parking. You want your toddler riding a bigwheel in the parking lot?
“With a large dose of the “Me Decade” mentality”
The problem in many condominiums is parents who have the Me mentaily who don’t supervise their kids and think everyone wants to hear them shrieking outside their window all day long, wants to have balls bouncing off their walls and breaking windows, wants to dodge teenagers riding bicicyles rapidly on sidewalks, wants teenagers with baseball bats resisting efforts to get them to play somewhere else, wants largs groups of (ten or fifteen) children running back and forth endangering elderly residents for whom a fall can cause serious injury, wants large groups of children riding bicycles in the parking lot and blocking access to parking spaces, and wants to have to re-sod the lawn repeatedly.
If parents would be considerate of their neighbors and teach their children to be considerate of their neighbors, the rest of us wouldn’t have to resort to rules to formalize simple common courtesy.
“The problem in many condominiums is parents who have the Me mentaily who don’t supervise their kids and think everyone wants to hear them shrieking outside their window all day long, wants to have balls bouncing off their walls and breaking windows, wants to dodge teenagers riding bicicyles rapidly on sidewalks, wants teenagers with baseball bats resisting efforts to get them to play somewhere else, wants largs groups of (ten or fifteen) children running back and forth…”
Does this really happen in condominiums? In which alternative universe do you live? I would be so happy to see groups of kids riding bikes or playing ball in my neighborhood. The few kids who live there are probably all indoors playing video games.
Oooh, will you move in next door? Our neighbor’s very first words to us, ever, nine years after we moved in, was to yell at my kids for playing basketball in our own driveway (pleasant weekend afternoon, there were still damleafblowers going all over the valley).
I never complain about kids outside playing basketball ever since a young man maybe 12 or so, out playing basketball with his friends as I jogged by, yelled out at me “You look like Neil Armstrong!” I figured he meant Lance Armstrong, and felt good the rest of the day! So your neighbor will never get to enjoy a moment like that!
Maybe he was saying you looked like you were running on the moon.
I once rented an apartment in a condominium community in which children were not allowed to play outside on condominium property. The condo did have a pretty big yard in which the kids could play, but the grass was off limits to children. Further, they were not allowed in pretty much any of the common areas. We got complaints all the time because the kids were visible or audible.
Officially, the condo community allowed children, but unofficially, they were second-hand-smoke.
Luckily, it was only for one year.
Dogs, kids and smokers keep off the grass! Eww!
Actually, rather than the problem being exclusively empty-nesters, I think that the high self-esteem movement has created a large segment of parents who do not watch and monitor their kids out in public. People are getting sick of putting up with three year olds throwing tantrums and kicking your seat while mom and dad look the other way. I have noticed more of a backlash against this behavior and parents seem to be disciplining kids more, at least in the circles I am around. Maybe if parents can show they are willing to teach their kids some manners, the public will become more kid-friendly. And kids need to learn these skills. However, until then, more people will shop at the kid-free Whole Foods and I can’t really blame them.
I agree completely – although there really are people who simply dislike having children around, most people have little objection to children who are well-behaved.
Tolerance levels vary by temperament and circumstance for what one might call ‘ordinary rambunctiousness’, among children. The ordinary elevated noise level of kids playing with each other is appropriate on a playground, but not in a restaurant, for example.
What most people don’t want to see or hear are children screaming, running about, throwing temper tantrums, and generally disturbing the adults around them.
Yeahbut… My grandmother did not “watch or monitor” her 9 children in public. Once in a while a teenaged niece did so, but generally grandma said “Go outside!” and the kids did, and eventually they came back inside again. In the mean-time they got “up to” stuff. In “public-public”, such as at church or other community sorts of places “grandma” was joined by the other adults in the community to “watch and monitor” other people’s children, to correct them, and to report misbehavior. My *other* grandmother lived in a city and had the local cops bring her little girls home (a la “Mary Poppins”) with some frequency because they’d get “up to” all sorts of monkey business. My mom was youngest and not much more than a toddler at the time.
It’s not just parents that have changed. Adults in the community don’t want to “watch and monitor” other people’s children. In fact, they get quite testy over it. Parents don’t want other adults correcting the behavior of their children. They get testy about that. Police would now arrest a parent instead of bringing young children home that had wandered far afield during play. A man paying attention to other people’s children and noticing they are in difficulty, much less correcting them, is now putting himself at great legal risk.
Lets us please be honest about the complete lack of supervision our grandparents were expected to provide. Let us also be honest about the expected participation of all of the adults in the community to at least notice if a child were getting into difficulty.
“Adults in the community don’t want to ‘watch and monitor’ other people’s children.”
A far more accurate way of identifying this dynamic is to say that contemporary society has made it more advantageous to ignore other people’s children. In the times of which you speak, most children had a basic level of respect for adults that had been instilled and enforced by their parents, school, church, popular media, and community. Today’s kids are taught daily that they’re right and all adults (especially men) are just stupid, mean people who, at best, don’t want them to have fun and, at worst, want to do harm to them.
Imagine a typical parent at a grocery store and their out-of-control daughter is running up and down the aisles and you see me, a middle-aged man with a goatee, reach out and stop her to tell her to knock it off. What is your reaction? Thank you, strange man, for stopping and talking to that bratty little girl? Or, more likely, why did that strange man grab that little girl? Why should I put myself into that situation, when almost everyone else would line up in Pavlovian fashion to support the parent against the “potential pervert.”
I am in full agreement with Synova, et al about the difficulty of disciplining your children in public. While my children are grown and out now, there were more than a few times that a quick swat on the rear to stop a tantrum would result in views askance from other adults nearby. You gotta do what you gotta do to raise your kids right, but I didn’t need judgment from the ignorant thrown on top of a child acting up in public.
Parents are fearful some hysterical passersby see a kid crying (because he wasn’t getting candy) and a swat on the rear (’cause he was being a brat) is ipso facto child abuse, the police are called, and soon they’re in the Thomas Ball scenario.
If society let parents of their own children BE the parents, and stopped trying to substitute the government as parents, (by forcing decisions, determining behavior, selecting nutrition, etc) then I think we’d all be better off. If your kid is misbehaving and you discipline her, then good on you. If your kid is acting up, and the neighbor drags him to your house by the ear to let you know what he did, then I say good on the neighbor.
It’s fine to complain that neighbors and other adults aren’t keeping up their end of the child-rearing bargain, but consider for a moment that as a 40-year-old man, my hands are tied. I can’t even look at little kids playing outside, much less approach them, much less talk to them, and still less touch one of them.
Yes, when we were little, we ran around the neighborhood with the other neighborhood kids, generally doing kid stuff. And yes, the neighborhood ladies (the ones who didn’t work full time) kept an eye on us, and yelled at us and threatened to call our parents if we didn’t straighten up.
If I tried to discipline a neighbor kid today? If lucky, the kid would tell me to eff off. If unlucky, I’d have an interview with the cops or child services.
Sure, it’s true that most of my neighbors are decent folks who wouldn’t nail me to the wall for disciplining their children. Funny thing is, some of my neighbors would be happy to. Care to place any bets on which kids most need discipline?
This was more or less my point. Or at least one of my points. Parents today aren’t less attentive than our grandparents were. They are likely more attentive, even compulsively so. People were expected to notice and either assist or correct other people’s children. Parents were not expected to hover.
Parents today aren’t innocent in all of this. But they aren’t at fault for slacking, either.
As the parent of three, who believed a swat on the bottom was required to help them concentrate on the manners being taught when they were young, I agree with you. However, you read these stories today about strangers calling social services on basic parental discipline and the resulting nightmares – I’m almost sympathetic to the parents that are reluctant to impose corporal punishment to children misbehaving in public. Of course, there are those who simply are too lazy to discipline.
I think the larger problem is that unlike the 50′s and 60′s, we have many people who have not been, are not and never will be parents. Like marriage, parenting is something only understood by those who have done it.
Like marriage, parenting is something only understood by those who have done it.
Ah, the widely recognized clarion call of the self-righteous (and often lousy) parent, the old “you can’t understand unless you are one of us” trope.
I’m not discounting experience in this matter; clearly, someone who is a parent *ought* to know more than a non-parent about parenting. But that presumes a mind willing and able to learn, which far too often is not the case. When I hear a parent responding to criticism with that line or some variant of it, I find that it often cements the impression that I already had, of that person being a stubborn sort who refuses to acknowledge their own responsibility for the results they have.
Get this straight: while it definitely helps to be an auto mechanic to precisely diagnose and repair a car, you don’t have to be one to know that smoke under the hood or failure to start indicates that something is wrong. Similarly, it doesn’t take a parent to recognize that a child, particularly those under seven, is merely doing what he or she has discovered to “pay off”, i.e. Result in what they want.
An experienced parent ought to know more than I about the nitty-gritty of how to fix that, but the evidence shows that there are too many who don’t.
Rather than getting defensive, good parents feeling put-upon by hearing the childless criticize parents in general should focus on their real problem: the bad parents giving them a bad name (and whose screeching progeny probably “abort” thousands of children every day by turning potential parents off child rearing).
I too will go out of my way to compliment parents with well-behaved kids. I’ve lived in Thousand Screaming Kids, California, where well-behaved children were like gold nuggets in a river of spoiled pebbles. Compare and contrast with a visit to a restaurant in Independence, Missouri, where I realized with a sudden start that it was full of children, and not a one was misbehaving.
I don’t need to be a parent to recognize the difference there, as well as be able to identify the causal difference, even if only in general principles. Moreover, while I may not have been a parent, I *have been a child*, and I am able to use that experience to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular parenting action.
So, with all due respect to parents for dealing with the challenges they do: spare me the “you cannot understand” dodge. I know and grant that there’s always much more to the situation than I can see at any given moment; that’s true for all of us, not just kids. But I have eyes to see, and (unfortunately, sometimes) ears to hear. I can tell the difference — especially with kids under six — between a tired or hungry child and one who is alertly working his parents in the Pavlovian pattern that he’s learned from repeated testing, to be effective.
Very well put.
Reminds me (somewhat) of hearing this: “Whose ob/gyn advice do you value more, the woman who’s birthed three kids, or the male obstetrician who’s delivered 500?”
Dr Helen, let’s not forget the large number of people who will be happy to call child welfare on you if you dare to discipline with a swat on the bottom. Parents (especially men) have to worry about that, too.
Dr. Helen,
I previously commented on the unofficially no-kids condominium I once lived in. We got complaints about the kids all the time. And this despite the fact that the kids I have are extremely well behaved. People often pull me aside in public places and comment on how well-behaved my kids are. They always listen. They are not under-parented. Some people just hate kids.
True. But, then, let Mom or Dad swat the kid on the butt and tell him to shut up and behave himself. Five minutes later the cops are on the scene because someone called them in to deal with a case of child abuse – and the cops are not going to take “no” for an answer, you’ve just entered Hell.
> I think that the high self-esteem movement has created a large segment of parents who do not watch and monitor their kids out in public.
You’re dead on target, Dr. Helen. So many parents do not raise children anymore, they just grow them.
Show me a kid who not only has never been spanked but has never been given a reason to fear adult authority, and I’ll show you a brat. Makes me want to spank their parents.
But it’s hard these days, in part because of counterproductive, intrusive local government in the form of “social services.” In Virginia, it is not illegal to spank your children, but it might as well be if one of your neighbors complains to these local goons. You do *not* want to go through that, particularly if you’re a young parent. These neighborhood Nazis have way too much power.
Agree — I’m the parent of three children (kicking the last one out of the nest next month) and I shudder every time I’m seated in a restaurant near children or board an airplane with multiple families aboard. I’m sick of putting up with precious snowflakes running amuck, the growing debris fields around restaurant tables, the shrieking, the tantrums, the pushing and shoving against adults to get to the cookies or through a doorway (a weekly occurrence at our church) — need I go on?
Well-mannered children are welcome almost everywhere, but they are a vanishing breed. When I do encounter them, I make it a point to compliment their parents.
The parents of these children are about to descend upon this post (as they always do) to tell the rest of us how hard their lives are, how they “have” to travel by airplane or have a “right” to enter private businesses and ruin everyone else’s experience. Spare me, okay? Spend your effort on civilizing your children so I don’t have to eventually put up with their behavior as lazy, whining employees.
Those compliments are so encouraging to parents tackling tough discipline problems. We took our two adopted special needs children to a nice Chinese restaurant and I was feeling frazzled by the end of the meal. Do you know how loud silver sounds on a glass covered tablecloth? Do you know how exciting/scary discovering new foods is to a six year old? Do you know how many times we said, “inside voice”? An older couple walked by our table and remarked on how well-behaved our sons were. My mouth dropped open, as that was not my perception. But that remark encouraged me to continue the hard work of teaching those boys how to behave, but those lessons have to be taught at home as well as in public.
If I can see that the parents are at least making an effort to handle the children effectively, I’m okay with that. You’re obviously one of them and I appreciate it. I know children aren’t angels and sometimes parents get overwhelmed.
It’s the parents who don’t do anything that get me teed off. And there are parents like that from all sorts of backgrounds.
You were blessed with a relatively compliant child. Congratulations. Now stop taking credit for things you have little to do with. With your attitude, you clearly wouldn’t last seven minutes with a strong-willed child. Strong as a little ox, stubborn as a little mule, willing to take every punishment ever devised by man or beast and still thumb his nose at you afterward. I’m an Army combat vet; trust me, his defiance is not for lack of stomach on my part.
By contrast, our daughter is a nearly perfectly behaved angel.
You want my kid to be respectful in public? Let me do what needs to be done to get him under control without calling the police on me. But until then, he knows he has a free pass when we’re in public. Kids aren’t stupid. They know they have the upper hand on you in public. Times have changed indeed, but it isn’t the parents or the kids. It’s the childless morons who demand you get your kid in line, but would be the first to throw you under the bus when they saw what it takes with some kids.
Huzzah, Brian! And Amen. I’ve had two radically different children too. And with the challenging child, you are constantly paranoid about the perception of strangers in public.
Some kids are not disciplined enough, and some kids are tough nuts. If you pay attention, you can tell the difference. The look on the parent’s face usually says it all.
Hah, I can sympathize. My oldest, when he was under 6, would take any punishment and give us a look straight out of the movies that said “Go ahead copper, do your worst, you can’t break me.” (Pleased to report that after years of beatings, he graduated cum laude from one of the top colleges in the country and is actually pleasant to talk to.)
Children, especially boys, are savages.
The problem is almost always with the parents. I have five kids, now all adults, and my oldest son is still rebellious at the age of 46 (He’s a trial lawyer) but he was well behaved in public when little and all of them were taught this way. A big part of this is consistency on the part of the parent. Kids learn by testing and if the parent says no five times and finally yes just to shut the kid up, that child has learned a lesson that will be very difficult to undo. You don’t have to yell or spank even. Just be consistent in a quiet, firm manner no matter how boring and annoying it is for the parent.
The problem, in addition to the loss of benign supervision by neighbors and others, is that parenting requires following simple rules that have been known for thousands of years.
My two year old daughter wandered off one time and a gas station owner five blocks away noticed her and called the cops. The police came about the time they got a radio call about her mother’s frantic call about a missing child. They brought her home, proudly standing in the front seat of the police car. She is now a lawyer and in law enforcement 42 years later.
One problem is parental discipline. Another is the changes in societal attitudes toward children. I agree about the parents who won’t discipline their children but they are a symptom of changes in society that are harmful to us all, not just children.
Kids learn by testing and if the parent says no five times and finally yes just to shut the kid up, that child has learned a lesson that will be very difficult to undo.
You bet. Intermittent reinforcement is the most powerful kind.
Among my children, bad behavior meant the instant end of the shopping trip for them. I also strove to avoid leading the little ones into temptation. I had a grocery list prepared in advance, we went in, gathered what was on the list, and got out promptly before boredom could set in. I never bought candy or toys at the grocery store when the little ones were with me.
There’s a reason the world was intelligently designed with the adults parenting their young rather than the other way ’round. Adults who (intentionally or not) subvert this system are fools.
You were blessed with a relatively compliant child. Congratulations. Now stop taking credit for things you have little to do with.
I think you ought to stop dodging responsibility for things you have more to do with than you will admit.
From what you tell us about your kid, I can recognize the outlines of a father and son pair I know well today. That kid is going to jail someday, is my bet. He’s got the same thumbs-his-nose attitude too. The difference is that I can see where that anger came from: the father’s arbitrary actions during the early years, which taught the kid to trust nothing and no one. I myself was a very strong-willed kid also; the difference is that my parents had sufficient consistency that I was able to develop trust in people later in life.
“It’s all a matter of luck” is another clarion call, but of excuse-seekers in all areas of life, not just parenting.
We have too few children these days and people will insist that their well behaved child is a result of their excellent parenting.
And then you meet someone who had one or two “little angles” and then births a hell cat and she comes to you and says, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I had no idea, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
Same family, same level of consistency, same parenting habits. Children are people, not constructions built by parenting choices.
This is why I only take parenting advice from someone with at least four.
+100 for the Army combat vet with children like mine. There is no one so judgmental about child-rearing than a parent of “easy” children. Even childless people are usually mature enough to admit there might be a thing or two they don’t know about child rearing, but people who already have children think they have seen the entire scope of possible child behaviors.
I am a parent of four children. I always try to keep my kids home when they are in a misbehaving mood, but occasionally we have to go somewhere and there’s no way around taking them with me. When your children run off in two or more different directions, the only choice you have to make is which one you want to get chewed out by other adults for not running after first.
I agree with you Brian, 100%. Discipline depends on the idea that you are able to put someone in a position where the pain of non compliance exceeds the pain of compliance. To an extremely determined and strong willed person, it may be “DEATH FIRST!”
My second one does what you tell him – no matter how much he does not want to do it – the worst we get is a moments hesitation and maybe a word of protest before he dutifully obeys
Polar opposites, same parents.
I have 3 children, all under the age of 5. I applaud the “No Kids Allowed” movement. We’re working on training our children to be polite and respectful and, above all, quiet when they’re out in public. It can be done and we’ve found that a large part of it involves knowing when to take them out and when not to (*never* when they’re tired).
On the flip side, there are restaurants that we’ve taken the kids to and there are restaurants that we’d never take the kids to. We enjoy a nice atmosphere as much as any childless person does—perhaps even more than they do! When we’re out without our kids, we’d prefer not to “enjoy” someone else’s undisciplined children as compensation.
The ideal would be a world in which well behaved children are welcomed and unruly children are promptly booted. But I can understand why businesses wouldn’t want the confrontations and potential lawsuits that would come from exercising discretion.
I only have one but when she was little if she acted up she was taken out and did not go back to where ever it was. If that meant I just blew a day ticket skiing I just blew it. I am not rich but I always figured that If I did not hold the line she had me. She had to know that when I said something I meant it. She is now 16 and while has her moments , knows that is I say something I mean it and tempers herself down.
Bravo. Now, if I only could have gotten my ex-wife to have exercised the same sort of consistency. Instead, it was a daily game, entitled “Mom has ‘X’ number of nerves left to-day before she blows a gasket, and it’s up to you kids to guess to-day’s value of ‘X’”. The daily value of X was governed by some bizarre Markov chain algorithm, which I never was able figure out.
To-day, some 10 years later, she complains that the kids are unruly and disrespectful to her. Strangely, I have no problems getting said ‘unruly and disrespectul’ kids to get off the X-Box and do their homework when they are with me.
Interesting. I didn’t know that this was a wide spread trend. I would attribute this mostly to societal peer pressure. Not against the child but the child’s parents. It’s mature, polite people not willing to put up with the results of some parents’ poor parenting. Their failure to teach their child things like social etiquette, boundaries and sitting quietly make them, to one degree or another, undesirable to be around. Its too bad that businesses have to enforce this common sense rule. At one time parents knew what social situations theier children were up to. They didn’t need an official policy spelled out for them. Is this the result of the “It’s all about me and my self esteem” generation?
Its pleasant to be in the company of well-behaved children – and thanks to good parents there are many out there. Perhaps this societal peer pressure will help reverse the permissive, indulgent parenting trend that seems all too prevalent.
It would be useful to know ahead of time, who doesn’t want our money. The restaurants that don’t welcome us, we don’t return to. The church that doesn’t welcome us, we leave. I’ve been pretty successful getting our kids to behave, after about the age of seven. Some folks either have a very poor memory, or weren’t very involved in their children’s upbringing, and don’t seem to have any idea what “good” behavior looks like, or recognize that there’s a process.
The one that really annoys me though, is the “adult-only” retirement communities. Yes, we and our children have to pay for both their summer and winter homes (with our Social Security taxes), but we’re not allowed to BE there.
I guess it’s time to decide: do you want kids around, here in the US, or did you save enough for retirement that you don’t need their SS taxes?
There’s a local restaurant that I frequent enough that I know the wait staff. They generally dislike having to work the Saturday lunch shift – 2 children eat free with the purchase of an adult meal.
I know what good behaviour looks like. Let me tell you, when small – and occasionally not-so-small – children are running thru the restaurant being a pain in my ear drums and a danger to the wait staff, or they’re kicking my seat, or they’re pitching a fit, or they’re generally trashing out the area they’re dinning in,call me crazy but that’s not good behaviour.
I’m a paying customer, too. I come in for some peace and quiet, to have nice meal, maybe watch a little TV if it is available, and generally mind my own business. But I can’t do that if your 5 year old is imposing upon my space.
Amen, Buttercup! I, too, have a daily lunch restaurant. Most parents come in in packs with their 5 or 6 kids between them and proceed to totally ignore them as they’re running up and down the aisles screaming (I HATE screaming), yelling at each other and throwing food. Literally throwing food. The parents (always mothers) keep chatting away with their backs to the kids, and only when the kid comes up behind them and hit them do they notice. They yell at them and go right back to each other. After their kids throw the food all over the floor under the table, they get up to leave, leave it all there on the floor, leave a $1.00 tip and skulk out, leaving the wait staff to clean up after snowflake.
Since this restaurant is my daily haunt, I have a good relationship with management and staff, so when I’ve had enough, I turn around and confront snowflake, in my best “Auntie” voice say “HAY, THAT’S ENOUGH! GO SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP!”. I am not doing this quietly. Snowflake looks totally shocked, goes over to the table, sits down and shuts up – for about 3 minutes. Only once did a mother stop her conversation and get up to berate me for daring to discipline her child. She was stopped in mid rise by the burst of applause from the rest of the restaurant.
Though I am a professional aunt and have no kids of my own, I know how hard it is to be a mom, it should be hard, kids are not just short adults. If you can’t handle hard, and if you aren’t prepared to raise your kids, who crave discipline and stucture only a parent can give, don’t expect the rest of us to have patience with you, or with snowflake.
Jeanette, it is clear that you believe others should be parenting your clildren, because it is too difficult or too much trouble for you. Why can’t you take your uncooperative 4 year old outside when they are tired and loud? If you have no control over your children, you are not parenting. Period.
I’m sorry, where did you get that Jeannette has “no control” over her children? Where did you get that she’s abdicating her parenting role? Seems to me she was saying that a child’s development is a process, and it’s implied that she’s come up against some people who have a low threshold for children not yet at the point in that process that the other people consider acceptable in public.
I have no idea what Jeannette’s children are like, but I can say that my oldest and middle children were easy to teach to behave properly in public, but that the youngest – now almost 8 – has been our great challenge: where our older two would modify their behavior at the “mom look” from me, the youngest needed frequent verbal reminders, much harsher consequences, and, when younger, had to be physically removed from the scene from time to time. Of course, we did what we had to do, and now he’s “safe” to take out – but as any parent knows, a child’s behavior at home is not necessarily 100% correlated with their behavior in public (naturally one tries to teach good behavior at home first, and only take a child out when the home behavior demonstrates his ability to keep it together in public), and there were indeed times when he was littler when I wished we hadn’t taken him out.
Love the point about the taxes. There are plenty of child-free adults relying on our children to pay taxes upon their retirement to support them through Social Security when they’re of age.
And I have read other comments about child-free people not wanting to pay for public education. Never mind these “child haters” probably received public education growing up, I have no qualms about not receiving public education for my kids. For the most part, public education is the worst option I could choose in my efforts of raising my children to be the kind of adults I would like them to be.
Since government is getting bigger and not smaller, this will never happen. But I’d let the people who prefer not to have children around keep their money and take care of themselves when their old and alone.
I couldn’t care less about access to restaurants, especially those who don’t want my business. However, housing and grocery stores are another issue. I think that it is abominable that our culture is so anti-child that it would even consider denying families access to housing, public areas, and food. Margaret Sanger, your legacy lives on.
“Anti-child”? What nonsense. Tripe. Stupidity.
I can’t even count how many times my wife and I have gone out for a nice meal and the waitstaff sits us next to a table full of children where they start wailing, or the parents repreatedly tell the child to stop, but not once do they ever *punish* them for misbehavior. In 50 encounters, including our church, I have never once seen a parent remove the child from the area until they stop.
So my wife and I, after long days at work, trying to relax and enjoy a good meal in a nice setting, a movie, etc. have to listen to the caterwauling of your ill-tempered and poorly mannered brat and waste our hard earned money with high pitch shrieks echoing in our ears. I get to be bowled over by rampaging drunken midgets every other day in practically any social setting you can imagine.
But we’re anti-child, it’s not that you’re anti-society, which is much more accurate.
“In 50 encounters, including our church, I have never once seen a parent remove the child from the area until they stop.”
That is precisely what it takes to get them to stop, and also helps to let otherwise irritated on-lookers know that you really are trying to do something.
My twin boys are 5 now and pretty well-behaved in restaurants aside from being a bit messy and verbally goofing around a lot, but oft-times one or the other would find something to pitch a real fit about. When he did so, I would say, “That’s it. You and I are going out to sit in the car.” The wailing would intensify drastically with a round of protestations, but it didn’t matter because the child was in my arms and I was heading for the door.
I would then open the car door, sit him on his seat and give him “One last chance.” If he took it (he always did) I made him verbally agree that the screaming and fits would stop, regardless of whatever it was that got him screaming in the first place.
How good it felt to then walk back into the restaurant with the little guy walking by my side (I refused to carry him back in, but would always hug and comfort him later on the way out), quiet and ready to settle down and enjoy the occasion with everyone else.
Would I actually have sat in the car if he had called my bluff? I don’t know because he never did.
HOWEVER – There was one really bad time, the first time my (Japanese) wife and I took the boys to Tokyo, a 12 hour flight. We made the mistake of getting 4 seats in a row, thinking everyone would be happy, but we were dreadfully wrong. Dad was persona non grata and both 2-y-olds wanted to be in Mommy’s lap ALL THE F!@#@# TIME. That was impossible of course, and the response on the absent child’s part was to wait INCONSOLABLY at the top of his lungs unless I picked him up and carried him up and down the aisle while everyone else slept.
11 hours.
Most passengers were very understanding but others gave us nothing but dirty looks, even as all they had to worry about was what game to play on their F@#$ing iPod. I totally understand and understood their feelings, but being trapped in a plane in that situation was horrible. If a man had said anything snarky to me I know for a fact I would have punched him and I would probably still be in jail to this day! Thankfully, no one did and we all got there in one piece.
On the way home I changed the seating to 2 pair of seats in different areas of the plane. The boy who sat with me was fine once Mommy was out of site and we both slept most of the way home. Lesson learned!
If this happened again, I think I would apologize to the stewardess in advance because I was about to make a scene. I would then read the screaming child the riot act and tell him (bluffing, as usual) that if he didn’t settle down and stop screaming I would toss him out with a parachute and let him float home while the rest of us went to Japan.
I used to do this at home and elsewhere when things got out of hand and it almost always worked, but…it would be a gamble, because if I failed to ‘sell’ the urgency of the situation, the child would not buy it and I would simply look like a fool. If it worked, I would of course look like a crazy, perhaps funny and otherwise successful Dad.
Alas, I didn’t have the balls for that at the time!
My father had a similar method. Once we were dragged from the table we knew it was all over but the crying. He was a hard man and an officer.
If we didn’t learn the first time, we spent the meal in the car while everyone else ate. Very simple rules. Followed by absolute enforcement.
Worked wonders.
I am not anti-child. I am anti-unsupervised screaming bratty kids whose parents refuse to provide any discipline. My neighbors kids are great (two families with a total of 5 kids ranging in age from 3 to 11). All of these kids are supervised and disciplined appropriately. Great neighbors with polite and well mannered kids.
Do you just not understand the part about misbehaving children and their apathetic parents? Or do you choose to belittle all who disagree with your choice to focus on yourself and how others directly affect you with their choices?
The replies to your comment, Jenn, have certainly brought the issue into sharp focus. Notice that many responders here auto-assume that when vexed by a child, the problem is 1) the child, 2) the parent.
No, the problem is people like Bill and Ferd and Jim here who scare the dickens out of mothers with their scowling and muttering.
Guys, children are people. They get cranky, they get wet and chafed, they get hungry… just like you. And just like you, they act out. But with a child it’s fixable… with a cracker or bottle or diaper change.
All of you, next time you’re seated on a plane next to a young person having difficulty, smile at the mother, tell her it’s okay, ask her if you should ask the stewardess for a cracker (iow, let her know you assume it’s just a passing thing). If you feel bold enough, ask if you can hold the child. See if you can be a calming influence. I can. I’d be surprised if some of you can. If you can do those simple things, you’ll be amazed at how quickly the situation defuses.
What makes you think I’m some cantankeous crank that scowls at children?
I love kids, I get along with them better than adults, but my kvetching here was because we’re discussing policies that are a result of ill-mannered children, which anecdotally and observationally I’ve found to be a problem of discipline and the lack thereof.
That’s all.
If I go out to nice resturaunt I expect a certain level of decorum. Society used to demand it. Now we have to put up with screeching no matter where we go in any social setting.
Hell, we put “No kids” on our wedding invitations because we wanted it to be an adults only occasiopn where people could just enjoy themselves without children running all over causing chaos.
4 people brought their kids anyway. And they were a pain in the a$$.
I don’t have all the answers. What I have are observations. And those are showing me that parents today are HORRIBLE at discipline. Society? Government intrusiuon? Who knows?
Bill, I would submit it is Jenn who is the “child-hater”. If you cannot or will not give your child the discipline and guidance they need to become healthy, happy, productive adults, you hate that child. And those of us without children aren’t by default “anti education”. As an employer, I know the value to society of an effective basic education and have no problem paying for it (as long as that’s what we get). But Jenn needs to close her pen and open her eyes. The rest of us who are telling her she needs to reevaluate don’t “hate” anyone. Well, we can disapprove of her tactics or behavior. That’s okay. Besides, methinks she does protest too much? A little defensive there?
Any restaurant with the decency to value the majority of its patrons over your particular monetary contribution will get my money. And to be perfectly honest, I’ve lived my life and budgeted my money on the assumption that I’ll never see a penny of SS money–that Ponzi scheme can’t last forever.
I admit to not having children, mainly because I know my limitations. What a horrible shame that certain people didn’t know theirs. And that their parental malfeasance and fecklessness have MADE child-free establishments the only solution to their depredations.
The above commenters get it right. It is about discipline. “The man who spares the rod hates his children.” “Children should be seen and not heard.”
The worst thing you can do for your children is leave them home or with sitters. How are they going to learn how adults behave, if they never see it? How will they learn to shop, if they never participate? Every outing with children needs to be used as an opportunity to teach them. Every amount of time needs to be used as such. It is not more of a burden to do so.
It actually makes things more pleasant when your child is engaged in the activity. It also makes your life in general better, because children then learn how to behave. You may be harried, but take the time. It is actually easier. Children cause trouble when they are neglected.
All the adults who meet my kids compliment us on them. Happy, well-adjusted, friendly kids. They have always been a stark contrast to other modern kids. I have encountered situations where folks have been tentative about having the kids there, but concerns are allayed in short order, and the kids are subsequently very welcome.
These places are not anti-children. They are anti-rotten-children.
Well said. My goal has always been that my kids could be in a china-shop and go manage themselves with minimal hands-on supervision.
That was the goal, mind you, not necessarily the reality!
We’ve done pretty well though. Bottom line is, you have to know what your kids don’t like, and then inflict that on them when they throw fits. Using rewards to try to entice them out of a fit is a slick, down-hill road to parenting Hell. My kids always hated to be excluded (twins, so go figure) from anything, so taking them out and then giving them a chance to return (under my exacting terms and not theirs) a short while later was the trick.
How does grocery-store-supplies-free-childcare (with no requirement to use it) mean that they’re part of an anti-child movement? That seems absurd!
If anything, it means that unlike in other stores, shoppers without children are subsidising those with (should those parents choose to take advantage of it). Stores doing stuff like this seem far from anti-family to me.
Agreed. The policy was clearly meant to ATTRACT families with children and not to restrict them. “What?! You mean you’ll watch my kids for free while I relax and shop (and try all the little tid-bits) unmolested? SIGN ME ON!”
IKEA does the same thing with their little playland area. It’s a great and very attractive policy for parents with toddlers.
For the author of the original article to draw the implication that Whole Foods doesn’t want families in their stores is silly. They SELL FOOD for chrissakes, and families need (and buy) MORE than couples!
it is not that people don;t want them, they are just focusing on other things in life – travel, career, money, and these things are becoming more widely accepted. You are seeing a lot of people have kids in mid 30s vs early 20s, so they are staying child free longer.
Katelyn http://www.dinklife.com founder
You DINKS sure are aptly named. We parents sure hate travel, career advancement, and most of all, money.
It’s called a sacrifice. It’s what gives life meaning. Self-indulgence will only get you so far. Not everything in life is about you.
Wow, you sound like a real prize, Brian. Some of us (many of us) who are childless in our 30′s aren’t necessesarily that way by choice or “selfishness”. I haven’t had the good fortune to meet the person I’d like to marry and have children with, and I’m not about to have one as a single parent. When (if) I have kids, I’m determined to teach them manners and control from an early age. They’ll be much happier kids that way. I think a lot of this “no kids movement” is also a backlash against society putting traditional families on a pedestal and denigrating childless adults as somehow being selfish or shirking our responsibilities. I say I’m being very responsible by not getting knocked up by the first @sshole that comes along, getting into an unhappy marriage, etc. Until the right situation comes along, I’m going to work hard (shockingly, that involves making money), improve myself (yes, that includes hobbies and travel), and be a happy person without kids.
If Katelyn has a brain, she’ll live in abject terror at the thought of her old age.
It’s not sacrifice when you are imposing your choices on others.
Exactly. Well said.
Brian, you had kids because you wanted kids: if you want something and then get it that is not selfless or making a sacrifice in and of itself.
Conversely, not having kids does not make you selfish: you don’t want kids, so you don’t have them.
Different people, different choices, different sacrifices.
The problem is that no one disciplines their kids, and those kids don’t listen when you tell them off for walking on your property. If you can’t get them to stop being little terrorists and their parents don’t care, the solution is to ban them.
When I was a child I was welcome wherever I went. I got into fancy restaurants because I acted with some decorum. And it’s not because I was a goody two shoes either. I just knew that if I acted up in a nice place I’d get a spanking. If I had kids, they would be treated the same way.
The “Me” generation is the a-holes who are so self absorbed that they don’t bother to be parents to the Junior Hoodlums that they are raising. And they can just stay the hell home.
I am a stay-home mom with children ranging from 9 to kindergarten. I have to agree with most of the negative comments about children. It’s summertime, and there are MANY children left alone in their houses in the care of an older sibling, or left with an indifferent babysitter, while mom and dad go to work.
Many of these moms and dads seem to believe I will be pleased to supervise their children as well as my own while I am gardening or while we are playing a game of family frisbee, etc. I have only to begin washing the car with my own kids on a Saturday morning to have a troupe of neighbor children straggle over to sit on our driveway or fool around with our garden hose. Many of these kids are unmannerly, ill-spoken, and frequently ask me for FOOD or if they can use the bathroom in my house, when their own home is just doors away.
It’s a parenting problem. Mom and Dad work all week; they do not want to be the bad guy and discipline when they are home. They also “need a break” and just want their kids out of their hair.
Sorry to vent.
Oh no, I’m glad you vented, Liz. As I scanned the comments, I was thinking about how much harder it is for us–moms of still-young kids–to deal with undisciplined children rampant in public today. Harder than it is for the empty nesters and the childless.
Our kids interact with them at school, on the playground, in the neighborhood. Which means WE have to interact with ‘em too. Me and hubs sometimes joke about “feral children.” Being outside more than some other parents, we turn into the Pied Piper or something.
Back when I was a kid, ANY adult who yelled at us and/or complained were given the benefit of the doubt. Now, I have to be careful not to get that “edge” to my voice, for fear of confrontation with Little Johnny’s mom–who I’ve never met until she’s dressing me down for dressing her boy down.
It can be rather ridiculous, being an old school type parent in a Brave New World.
As others have noted, it isn’t children pre se that we mind, it’s undisciplined children. Several years ago, I was sitting next to a woman on an airliner. The child behind her was putting both of his feet against the back of her seat and pushing hard. He did this several times before the woman turned around and demanded Momma Oblivious put a stop to it. “Oh, is he bothering you?”
Conversely, my wife and I were on a cruise last March. On one of the cruises formal nights, a young family sat at a nearby table. Their children were perhaps 3 and 5 years old and were perfectly behaved. I made it a point to complement their parents. They obviously care enough about their children to teach them how to behave even at those young ages. I only wish my grandchildren were 1/10th as well behaved in public.
I don’t have a problem with well-behaved kids, or parents that will be parents. I do have a problem with baby spawners who are insulted at the concept that the strangers upon whom they inflict their ill-mannered whelps in public should dare to complain. I’d have had my butt handed to me on a stick by my parents if I dared even a fraction of what is being forced upon the public by these arrogant baby spawners. You are not your children’s friends, you are their parents. If you’re not up to it, don’t have them. And I will patronize those places that keep you and your mini-barbarians out.
“Baby spawners”? Really?
What is it with the “child-free” people that they are so full of hate?
Jsallison,
You’re really quite incredible. Did you get trained as a child to be such a jerk?
All,
Before I was married and had two children, I knew those with children DESERVED special privileges. After having two children, I still know the same thing. My position is consistent. I suspect many have inconsistencies. They are more concerned with what is best for them at this moment.
Some points:
1. Yes, men are justly terrified of talking to a child. This needs to change.
2. Anti-child establishments should be shunned by all decent people. Misanthropes and bigots are generally not fully decent people.
3. It is true that everyone should be able and willing to say a ‘word of warning’ to a misbehaving child.
4. Parents should be encouraged to spank their children in public. CPS needs to be used as a pinata.
5. Yes, consistency, consistency, consistency is the best way to discipline a child.
6. It is not a dodge to say the childless usually don’t understand. I was childless for some time, and have been a father for some time. I have LEARNED a very great deal. Some basic outlines of what should be done with children are available to all, but the parent is the EXPERT.
7. It is easy for the elderly and the childless to be selfish and to be focused on their present pleasures than on the Future. However, the Future is a very large part of what is going on in any healthy human society.
8. Woman need to get married younger, and have lots more kids.
9. Let us destroy Feminism, post-haste.
As the father of an infant, I go out of my way to keep my daughter quiet while in public. For example, my wife and I haven’t taken our daughter to a movie theatet, and won’t until she can be quiet. I think the “problem” is that there are a lot of parents who aren’t as considerate.
If it’s any indication about parental oversight.
Here in Atlanta we have two amusement parks, Six Flags and White Water. Parents purchase a summer long pass and then drop off their children on each morning with a few bucks to last them all day, every weekday from school dismissal in late May to their return in early August.
These aren’t teenagers, but children as young as 8.
Surely the horsemen, if not placing saddles on the backs of their mounts, are already mounted and at a walk or perhaps a trot already.
The baby boomers were awful parents. Now their kids are parents.
The problem today is not kids (who have been and always will be little devils).
The problem is the parents.
Indeed. This is not a new trend. This is a return to how things really used to be, where kids weren’t free to run roughshod on the world so their “feelings” wouldn’t be cramped or some such nonsense.
As far as the Boomers goes, Every single generation in human history has said the following “I will not turn into my parents.” and then every single generation has matured and became their parents.
But not the generation that stood naked in the rain at Woodstock, promised to “be cool” with their kid, smoke dope with their sons, let their 15 year old daughter sleep with their boyfriends in the house etc.
The Boomers actually went ahead and “Did it.”
Got the rare opportunity to fly back from California next to a mother holding her three year old – whether it was required or she was cheaping out on buying the kid a ticket I don’t know. The kid was clearly out of control and all the mother would do was beg and plead with her toddler in increasingly desperate voice to “please stop” for four hours. Meanwhile the kid attempted to become my new best friend by kicking, hitting and otherwise attempting to distract me for the entire flight.
I felt horrible for her. She clearly lacked any ability to control her kid and was totally embarrassed at his behavior. He was an annoying little s*#^, as many kids are.
I would also gladly pay an extra few bucks for an airline that required kids to sit together, sit in their own seat or made them take another airline. And I have the money to do it because I figured out how birth control works.
Airplanes are really tough for all concerned. You can’t take your kid outside and read him the riot act, you can’t spank or even yell at them without making such a scene that the pilot would probably turn back just to see what the fuss was about. Best just to hunker down and suffer through until you get to where you’re going. You end up looking like a schmuck and try to ignore all the ‘bad parent’ stares from strangers who have no greater responsibility in their life other than dozing and flipping through magazines for the next few hours.
After having a screaming child of my own on an 11 hour flight (who is now 5 and a very polite and quiet flyer) I have vowed to, in the future, trade places with someone in your position should the opportunity to do so ever arise.
I feel for you and all parties concerned, and can assure you it’s awful for all concerned.
My daughter was once horrible on an airplane. But it was her first flight, the plane was ridiculously hot, and we were flustered as new parents, having just received her from an orphanage in Nanchang. Apologies to anyone who had to deal with us on the way to Guangzhou. Of course, the Chinese were polite and courteous, checking to see what little person had made all that noise.
I am still stunned to see parents here letting their kids act so badly here. I was incredibly embarrassed by that incident, and there was just nothing we could do.
/She is generally considered the best-behaved kid people have seen, but of course at her age, if we’re in church or something and she wants to cry, juice/toy/cheerios aren’t working, daddy and her will go outside…
//We take her out to eat sometimes, but only to diners or very large Chinese restaurants. Next flight probably won’t be ’til she’s five or so, but a cruise is likely…
We, too, adopted our daughter from China. By the time we flew home, she was already an experienced traveler at 15 months of age due to the flights within China we made. Fortunately she traveled well (I know all to well the experience of being a flustered new parent, having been handed a new child with previous life experience and who may not yet be willing to accept you as her parents…with bonus frustration points if she is your first child…fun times). Our group was 11 families; 6 of whom were on the flight from Hong Kong to Chicago. As we boarded the plane, one flight attendant saw our group’s families carrying their babies and visibly rolled her eyes and muttered a not-quite-silent-enough, “Oh no!” During the roughly 15-hour flight no child in the group cried more than once, and none for more than a minute or two. But that flight attendant’s reaction to our new families boarding (coupled with other poor treatment during the flight, and damage & delay to our luggage) has led me to vow never to fly United again.
You all sound like a bunch of crotchety old men. I promise, when your kids were three they were doing all the things which currently annoy you about three year olds. You just forgot.
A couple of weeks ago my husband, an elderly friend of ours, and I were having supper at Fuddruckers. In the booth behind me were people using a straw to make whistling noises. I’d assumed it was the 7-9ish aged boy making all the noise, but it turned out to be his dear old dad, who apparently was an overgrown adolescent, at least psychologically speaking.
When I finally turned around to tell them to cut it out, since people were trying to talk, I was shocked to see the “adults” egging the kid on and teaching him the technique with the straw.
Yeah… it’s the parents setting a lousy example that most of us childless adults really resent. If you want your kids to be welcome in public, please teach them to be respectful of everyone else.
I am father who was very involved with parenting and raising my 3 now-grown children.
If you as a parent can not teach your little princes and princesses to behave, please do us all a favor and keep them locked up in your fantasy world. Or do not have children.
My grown children are well mannered, polite (generally), confident, resilient, fun, and independent thinkers. And they were raised that way.
Children do not emerge from the womb knowing how to be respectful of others.
And please, spare me the self-esteem stuff. You do NOT want a child with high self-esteem, you want a child who is curious, confident, tenacious, resilient, and respectful of others. There is a world of difference.
I blame the parents who bring children into restaurants and stores and let them run wild. Once you go through that enough times, your tolerance goes out the window.
No one minds a well-behaved child. But letting them run wild, screaming and yelling constantly? It happens all the time now.
Its not the children or the people fed up with the loud children. It’s the parents of the children who run wild.
I’m 57. I was generally a good kid when the parents went out to dinner. I acted up once, and didn’t go out for dinner again for a year. And I never acted up in public (well, with my parents around anyway) again.
I do not understand parents who feel the kids must go everywhere with them. Life changes when you have a kid, but so many people don’t accept that. So, we get toddlers at movies, and cranky 3 year-olds at Ruth’s Chris.
My parents generation always was concerned about what we looked like to “others”. My generation rejected that. But civility went out the window, because if you don’t care what others think, then anything goes.
I’m sensing a nostalgia for a Dickensian golden age that never was. Until old norms were overwhelmed by sheer numbers sometime in the Fifties, standards for child behavior in public were pretty tight, and enforceable by virtually anyone. We don’t do that any more.
Can no one recall the sudden emergence of “family” (meaning “kid-friendly bad”) restaurants? Those were the places where unruly brats were to be expected. The rest of polite society was off limits to the litter-on-a-leash crowd. Yes, I am a parent; I was perfectly willing to carry an unhappy child around a parking lot until calm, and my child was welcomed everywhere we went.
We may merely be returning (clumsily, since it’s us) to some semblance of an older order.
Spoiled baby boomers that wanted the world to revolve around them as children and teenagers become intolerable bitchy adults that demand the world revolve around them as they hit retirement.
What’s new?
I’m sure all the complainers were “little angels” when they were kids, and never misbehaved in public. How fortunate for you and your parents. Hilarious.
Well, many places that cater to kids have been made no-go for singles, especially males, or even adults without kids (playgrounds, sometimes whole parks) so why not have places that people can be comfortable without having to worry about kids being around. Who the “second-class” citizen is depends on your viewpoint and whether your ban is enforced by the police.
Once adults were banned from being around kids, why would places adults could be without kids be created?
Most of the comments here seem to be in agreement that it’s not children that are the problem but poorly behaved children.
In my experience, I see that too many parents today forget that they are parents when they are out with their children. My own children were largely well behaved when we took them out (to the point where my wife and I frequently received comments how well behaved they were.) Were they angels? No. But my wife and I would never hesitate to correct their behavior, even in public. Sometimes that took only a cold stare and other times an audible (to others around) reprimand. Other times if one of my daughters were too cranky or too wild it meant leaving and going home. Others around don’t only appreciate well behaved children, they also seem to appreciate active parenting. But all too often when we are out now, I see many parents who are totally uninvolved with what their children are up to. I see to many situations where the child calls the shots and sometimes loudly challenges the parent in public after the parent ineffectively tried to stop some obnoxious behavior.
Pretty sure there is a common-sense/common opinion here. Parents should parent. Well behaved children are welcome everywhere that brats and their enablers haven’t ruined reception already.
What’s puzzling me is what the me generation is expecting to happen when they get to nursing-home age. They don’t want kids. Or, they have them and dump them on Grandma to raise.
News flash: Grandma’s gonna pass on. Your kids will hate you, or at least despise you. Who “will still feed ya, when you’re sixty-five”, to paraphrase a classic. That generation is, I guess, expecting the government will tenderly care for them, supply them with drugs and wash their tattooed, pierced and plugged bodies.
Nah.
They’re just not thinking, as usual.
I just want to give those “No-Kids-Allowed” people a medal. And a parade for having the decency to react to customers’ wishes.
I went to the library today. There were two small children running around screaming at the top of their lungs. The mother just sat and texted, until she accused one of the librarians of being “rude and condescensing” when he asked her to keep them quiet.
I have very little problem with well behaved children in most settings. Obviously, there are times – like night time parties – when it’s grown ups only, but apart from that I’ll just ignore them.
But there’s a sense of entitlement in many modern day parents which often manifests itself in a refusal to accept other peoples’ needs. If the child genuinely cannot be expected to keep quiet, then why are they bringing her to the event/place? Heaven forfend a parent’s life might have to *change* or something…
If I take my kids somewhere and they can’t behave I will remove them period, until they can behave or leave the event immediately. They know this and fall into line after only a simple admonishment. Parents need to be willing to leave an event as soon as the kids act up. If you stick it out and put up with bad behavior you send a message to the kids that their behavior is acceptable. We leave if they can’t behave. Movie theater, ball game, restaurant, doesn’t matter. After a few times of actually cutting their fun short the kids will get it.
If Whole Foods, or any other store for that matter, in my area started “kid-free hours” I would stop shopping there. Period. We are raising our daughter to be polite and well disciplined; we are also making every effort to include her in our lives as much as possible (she is 7 and we often get comments from store employees about how well behaved she is). She loves to come along with me when I go shopping, but if I had to modify our habits based on hours I could take her with me I would rather modify them to shop elsewhere. If you don’t want my business during certain times of the day when you are otherwise open to the public, you don’t want it at all.
Businesses should ask parents of ill-behaved children to mind them or leave, rather than issue blanket bans on all children. I guess it’s easier to just say as a rule parents today suck than face the fact that no one anywhere wants to “be the bad guy.” Consequently you get harebrained ideas that passive-aggressively alienate entire classes of customers rather than risk a personal confrontation with a less-than-perfect parent on the occasion one is encountered.
1. The problems cited by Ed in the article are nothing more than the inevitable frictions encountered in urban living when differently situated and valued groups end up living in proximity. Children are not an inherent part of the problem, merely an aspect sometimes present.
2. Jeez, your comments! While there are a coupla pleasant and insightful ones, there’s nothing to hang a hat on–just angst. No wonder today’s parents hover so much! You guys should all go see the movie “Buck,” still in limited run.
3. Thank God I was raised in the South in the 50s when rearing was robust and it was okay for kids to be goofballs! We learned to live, not duck from shadow to shadow as some of you seem to expect from children.
4. In raising three boys, now all in their 20s, all the discipline I ever needed was a certain tone of voice, and that rarely.
5. With childless couples (and Germans), there is often pain there, either from childhood or from infertility. I bore the few barbs I ever got stoically. As for one-child-only lefties of the ZPG bent who’d start babbling about “breeders” and “spawners” on spying my brood, screw ‘em.
6. The secret? Leave the angst about children in public behind. My wife and I always expected that public interactions would go swimmingly, and they did. When you see kids having trouble maintaining in public, it’s often because of the fear their parents are projecting at the thought of having to deal with brittle, prickly people like some of you.
Interesting related story, my wife is Filipina and we only married last year at 44. We would like kids but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards biologically. Last week she hosted a small birthday party for me at our new house, combined with an adults-only poker game later in the evening. Apparently in Filipina culture it is impolite to request people not to bring their children. “Adults only” is a pretty foreign social construct to her. Our house does not have a “Play Station” nor do we have many Pixar DVDs or age appropriate games. My wife refused to give notice so I agreed to make do. Her cousin has three adorable daughters (11, 8, 4) and those girls had fun, mostly entertaining themselves. They found Pictionary amusing, the wife let them use her laptop and they were well-behaved. Her friend’s seven-year old son was a completely different story. His parents are like us, Filipina woman, married late in life to a White man, although he is a decade older than me. While the husband buried his face in his Blackberry the whole night and the wife socialized, they let their son run wild throughout our house. Among his greatest hits were: trying to take poker chips from the game, while it was in progress, jamming a wooden baseball bat into a commemorative beer stein, repeatedly interrupting the poker game and to top it off, asked if he could “have” a small crystal dragon (that was a unique wedding favor) that his dad told him was probably plastic. I said, “No” and sure enough when cleaning up after the party, the head was snapped off of the dragon. As we were leaving the Father, while pointing out that the kid has a “problem keeping his hands off other people’s stuff. He does this in the supermarket all the time” threatens the kid with a “time out.” Wow, what discipline! On your way out the door, now you threaten the kid with what, five or ten minutes of quiet time. Yeah thanks Dad. I brought this up to my wife and told her I wanted her to email her friend with our concerns and she almost flatly refused. She did not want to hurt her friend’s feelings over how their son had behaved, and, of course, reflect badly on her parenting skills. Her mealy-mouthed, illogical defense was something along the lines of, “We just won’t invite them over here anymore.” I explained that I wanted to point out what was done how it upset us and politely ask that her son’s behavior never be repeated in our house again. Her first attempt at an email was so self-effacing; seeming as if it was our fault. I began writing an email, basically “loved having you….bring this to your attention……he did…….please not again” I threatened to send my email if she didn’t come up with something more forceful, which she did eventually. I told her that regardless of her culture’s views on child-raising, we had a right to point that out to the parents and not feel guilty about it. Oh I forgot to mention, the boy is an only child and Dad was born into money. I told my wife I can already imagine the parent-teacher conference in about ten years as they go after the teacher who tries to bring their perfect little angel to bear.
I learned early that the trick with other people’s children in my house is to (after a few chances) yell at them as if they were my own. I almost always get a deer in the headlights expression and compliance, which tells me the poor kids have never once encountered that sort of resistance before.
Parenting is an activity! It’s cruel for parents to passive-aggressively expect them to be reasonable on their own, even as they know they can’t.
New parents, please listen carefully: IT’S OKAY TO SHOUT!
The baby boomers were awful parents. Now their kids are parents.
The problem today is not kids (who have been and always will be little devils).
The problem is the parents.
This is something I’ve discussed with my peers many times. I’m in my late thirties and became a parent three years ago. My wife and I sometimes feel like we’re overly strict because we seem to be the only parents disciplining our daughter when the rest of the children in the room are bouncing off the walls.
But then we remember all the kids in their early twenties entering the work force now who are damned near incompetent when it comes to social interaction and behavior. WE DO NOT WANT OUR DAUGHTER TURNING INTO AN ADULT LIKE THAT!
So let the other parents be their kids friends…we prefer to behave like our parents did and instill good behavior and discipline into our child who will ultimately appreciate it far more as an adult. At the same time, many of the kids in her age group will grow up wondering why they’re always “victims” and they can’t do whatever it is they damned well please.
So yeah, it’s the parents’ faults…and nobody else’s.
Granted, I was over-generalizing about Boomers, but I agree with your point.
I am an early-40′s Gen Xer, and I started noticing the pattern back when I was a teenager. “What’s up with other people’s parents?” (My parents are Silent Generation, middle of the road, and taught me manners, thrift and a work ethic.)
So today I look around at parents that are my age, and I just have to ask, “Where are the grown-ups?”
Aside from parents who don’t control their children or who bring them to situations that truly aren’t appropriate, and childless people who act like dicks even around well-disciplined kids, this is a demographic issue. The number of homes owned by single people has exploded over the past 15 years, so you’re a lot more likely to have neighbors who don’t understand that kids may make noise in spite of parents’ best efforts.
I know it’s just the logical result of a chain of bad parents but what bothers and disturbs me the most are the parents in public places who clearly KNOW their chirren are misbehaving and annoying, but have a look on their faces that DARES anyone to say anything. Invariably that defiant look is on the face of the mother, never the father that I can recall.
What that implies to me is that, for whatever reason, she resents having had her chirren, so she’ll see to it everyone else does, too.
DINKs will like my kids in about 15 years, when they are paying for your social security payments.
Quite frankly, I think that parents should get a 5% per kid rebate on payroll taxes.
50′s, 60′s up bringing? My father talks about the 20′s & 30′s the same way. Look at most of the world and kids are still exposed to their society the same way we use to be before the 70′s. Good kids, bad kids, there’s all kinds of kids just like there’s all kinds of adults that we ‘tolerate’. Difference is now people don’t accept that their society includes kids. People in this country are starting to believe that society is sterile and government controlled to optimize ‘harmony’. If kids aren’t part of the society until they get older, then how are they ever going to reconcile youth with community and values and adults? Sorry “ME’s”, it IS society’s responsibility to help raise their replenishment stock. Everyone use to watch over the kids in the neighborhood because they all knew those kids had to be integrated into society to perpetuate society. They Were part of society. Learning to interact with society meant, well, interacting with society not just simulations with your parents. Now, people don’t even know where ‘meat’ comes from so being clueless about where ‘productive members of society’ come from isn’t surprising. Clearly, all we need to fix this is another … law.
Boomers became hippies, then created the “Me Decade”, then Yuppies. Now they are facing retirement and it is still Me, Me, Me. What a pathetic sense of entitlement the Boomers have. Give me my benefits, my freedom to wallow in the mud at Woodstock, and don’t bother me with your kids. Never has this country seen a more spoiled, self-indulged group of people. These boomers lecturing us now were the same ones that rejected the 1950′s mindset of child rearing. Now they recall their early childhood as “the good old days” when it suits them. They possess no moral compass!!!!!!!!!!!
Now, mine are grown but I have a new policy – you can have no kid policy but I spend my money elsewhere. Children should be part of life or they never grow up. This is the other side of the coin: one part of this generation can’t be bothered to raise kids properly and the only doesn’t ever want to be inconvenienced by anything.
I don’t have a problem with kid-free environments per se. No one expects to show up at cocktail parties with their kids in tow — although I’ve found that’s the default in rural communities. Laissez-faire parenting has certainly become increasingly problematic, and I certainly don’t want my romantic night out spoiled by a food fight at table next to mine.
What bothers me, however, is the presumption that childless people’s’ comfort and convenience should come first. The folks who think they should obviously have dibs on the first class airplane cabin might not be so quick to endorse a child free zone at the back of the bus. If we’re going to divvy up air travel, let’s give parents all the day flights, and let the child-free take the late night flights. Feel free to develop child-free condo conclaves, or use that extra cash to buy into a gated community; just don’t move in with families and then expect to ban their children from public spaces. Letting kids work off their exuberance outside is a big part of what makes good behaviour inside or in more adult environments possible.
One method I have of dealing with the ‘unique snowflakes’ in public whose mom’s/Parent’s refuse to quiet or discipline them is to commend them for being so patient and caring with their ‘special needs child.’
At first, the reaction may often be confusion. I re-iterate how tolerant and terrific parents they must be to be able to deal with such a ‘special’ child since I have an 11-yr old and parenting her is difficult enough.
By then they’ve usually understood that I think their kid is mentally handicapped, and they either leave from shame or quiet their child down immediately.
The key to this interaction is to be ultra-positive when speaking to the parent and remove any trace of sarcasm from your voice.
{obvs there is nothing shameful about being a parent to a true special-needs child, quite the opposite. Most of those people I know are close to sainthood.}
That’s devious. I will have to steal it…..
But seriously, there are some people who just, well, hate kids. My little ones (both under 5) are pretty well behaved. The youngest is a toddler, and if she’s not teething, she’s usually ok 99% of the time. That being said….I have had people glare at me for bringing them to church (during Christmas week, no less. Heaven forbid they take a closer look at the manger scene.), and for letting my boy run around and yell with his buddies on the playground. Yep….a fenced playground. If there was a possibility he or his pals could run out in the street or knock someone (or their pets) over, I could see the point of complaining, but….there wasn’t a chance of that. I *thought* that was one place where it was acceptable for a kid to be a little loud and boisterous, but apparently not.
I’ve seen other customers visibly cringe when I come in the door with my kids at restaurants and stores. You would think they would relax after a few minutes of (not) hearing or seeing my kids acting up, but….oh no. They keep staring over at us until we finish our meal or our transactions. (I try to avoid those places, but in a small city sometimes I don’t have any other option but to return there.)
I know sometimes it seems like all the kids are brats, but if you see a parent trying to do a good job, please encourage them. As a parent of small kids, sometimes that’s the only nice thing I hear all day, and I cherish it.
“The worst thing you can do for your children is leave them home or with sitters. How are they going to learn how adults behave, if they never see it? How will they learn to shop, if they never participate? Every outing with children needs to be used as an opportunity to teach them. Every amount of time needs to be used as such. It is not more of a burden to do so.”
The poster who said this sounds like a pretty reasonable guy who raised his kids well, but I have to disagree.
The argument of, “How will children learn good behavior and table manners if their parents aren’t allowed to take them out to nice places?” holds no water. Children act in public the way they are permitted to act at home, and if they don’t respect mom and dad, they sure as hell arent going to respect any other adult or pick up cues from them. Good behavior and table manners start with the family table and once they’ve mastered that domain they can and should gradually move up to nicer establishments. People don’t pay a lot of money for a nice dinner so other people who are parents can have an audience and atmosphere for a behavioral lesson. My date night is not intended to be an opportunity for someone else to teach junior proper etiquette at a fancy restaurant.
Last Sunday night, there was a ~2 yr old child at a screening of Harry Potter. The parents decided it was perfectly ok to let the child run through the aisles chattering. People kept shushing, but the parents did nothing. I finally shouted “take your kid out of here” and then other shouts of “here, here!”. Still the parents did nothing! Someone had to get theater management to come and force them to leave. Why would you bring a child to a 7pm showing of an age inappropriate movie and then refuse to take them out when clearly it wasn’t working? There were 200 people who payed $13 each to have their movie viewing ruined by this family. This is why people are banning kids from places.
BTW, I would not complain about a noisy child at a Disney animated movie. That goes with the territory.
There’s always been children who misbehaved and those who didn’t. I think the latter group has grown in recent times, but the ‘kid-free’ trend comes from a lack of respect for others in the parents.
We used to understand that just cause one has a “right” to do something, doesn’t mean you should do it. I guess you have a right to take your kid to an expensive restaurant. But it’s rude and inconsiderate. Even if your kids are well behaved, it’s probably not proper. There’s nothing wrong with adults wanting to get out and be with adults.
But by the same token, don’t go to a chuck E Cheese – or even McDonald’s for that matter – and expect a nice quiet meal.
And as far as the social security points made earlier, give me a break. Not only are you not paying for them… but last time I checked you can’t buy a vacation home on 14k take home a year.
First, some of the loudest and most irritating people in public are adults (many of them clearly childless, by the way). If a child’s behavior annoys you, you should at least ask yourself how you’d react if an adult were behaving in a comparable way, e.g., talking as loud and long on a cell-phone as a child is shouting. Children aren’t under a *greater* obligation than adults to be quiet and still in public.
Second, children provide external benefits as well as external costs. They are often cheering and amusing. When their benefits are counted as well as their costs, they might be a net benefit–or at least a net cost too small to be worth using resources to try to eliminate.
My wife and I do not have children, but we enjoy being around them when they are well-behaved. The same applies to teens. The problem is that so often, they are not well-behaved. In the America of my youth, if a child or teen behaved rudely in public, it was accepted that any adult could speak up and discipline them, at least to the extent of scolding them. Nowadays, adults have little power to impact the behavior of teens or children misbehaving. In my hometown, teens have taken to forming baracades across entrances to public places and businesses. It is now unlawful to touch a minor in any way – even to push these miscreants aside so you can enter a building on a public sidewalk. If you do this, the kids call the cops. It is unlawful to touch them, and they know it and use it as weapon. As an adult, you have to call the police to disperse the kids. Given these realities, is it any wonder that many adults no longer wish to be around young people? The inmates are running the asylum, as the old saying went.
“Children are not born knowing how to behave…” A post above made that statement, which is right on the money. As most anyone who’s had or been around small children or teenagers can tell you, kids are barbarians. Well-mannered, civilized adults do not magically spring into being; they are the end result of many years of painstaking parenting and hard work by teachers, coaches and the growing person himself. In a sense, civilization exists for the benefit of the young, to provide an environment in which they can develop into full-fledged adults. Tear that environment down, or weaken it dramatically, as the countercultural left has done since the 1960s, and the result is what we have today – a society populated by children in adult bodies, unable or unwilling to function as civilized adults.
On more than one occasion, when I’ve asked a parental unit to tamp down their running / screaming / breaking child, I’ve been told in reply in thickly-accented broken English that “it’s just a child — let him behave like a child!”. Do I need to add that the accent the of the parental unit was Mexican / Latino.
For me, basking in a childless atmosphere merely means it’s one more way of avoiding the illegals and the across-the-board bad behavior they bring with them as they slither into our country and then spawn.
When did kids become the equivalent of second-hand smoke? >>>
Am pretty bitter that I cannot enjoy a smoke at a bar in most states these days- there is no reasoning with the global warming/second hand smoke know nothings- and since there is no reasoning to be had they got the government to pass nanny laws. No choice.
So why does anyone think they can reason with the parents that raise monsters? It cannot be done, so how about some more “nanny” laws? I can make the argument that bad parents/kids are worse for society than a pro choice smoke tolerant bar- so I want parents and their kids to undergo testing and if they pass they will be issued, for a fee, a license to take their kids to restaurants, on planes, to movies, to national park visitor centers, etc.
I fail to understand why kids are a problem? Do they come up o you and punch you or take stuff out of your shopping carts? If not, then how are they bothersome or preventing you from shopping? I’ve been going to Walmart for over 20 years, and kids are always crazy running in the isles, etc. Sure, the parent should control them more, but they have never inhibited my shopping. Besides, if you go to stores like Walmart to “look around”, then that is your own fault. Go with a list, get in and out.
The Me-Generation keeps on keep’n on. Only now they are old and cranky. GET OFF OF MY LAWN. All you wankers out there whining about children making too much noise, why don’t you just turn down your hearing-aids?
More than once, in grocery stores, malls, post offices and so on, I have had to parent a child behaving badly when the real parent refused to do so. Old ladies being almost knocked over by running 8 and 10 year olds in grocery store made me step in and pull them up.
No one would object to children being anywhere if they are well behaved, but in this current narcissistic culture where parents want to be friends with kids, everyone, especially the kids, suffer greatly.
Society will pay a great price.
I want child-free airline flights.
That is all.
I for one am glad for kid free areas. it should be based on the free market. but i think it will be good. Parents nnowadays do not teach their kids how to behave and then make sure to take them to places where they do not belong. Its not the kids we mind so much but the parents not teaching them how to act. Kids have so many places they are welcome, that parents need to limit them to that. ‘not fair’ you say? well too bad. you signed up to be a parent not me. and there are times i have nearly gotten into fights with other people cause their kids are running around like lil spongebob tornadoes and the parents refuse to dicipline them.
“How will children learn good behavior and table manners if their parents aren’t allowed to take them out to nice places?”
First teach them at home. When they are successful at home take them to child-friendly restaurants. When successful there, take them to family restaurants. Continue as they achieve the ability to behave for ever more stringent situations. Very simple. If you up the level of behavior expected and they do not match it, take them out immediately. Tell them why. Return only when the child is ready and willing to abide by the rules of that level.
Know your child. Cannot stay in their seat for 1 hour for dinner? Do not take them to a restaurant at which dinner will take 1 hour. Very simple.
Gets cranky after 7pm? Do not take them to a restaurant after 6pm. Pick times and places where they can be successful to help them learn. If you want or need to go to a place they are not ready for, get a babysitter and go without them.
“None of these people came here tonight to hear you.” I have only needed to use that phrase when other people’s children were with me, but use it I do. Sometimes all they need is the reminder that there are other people here. Sadly, too often they do not know why other people should be taken into consideration.
There are and should be times and places for adults only and for adults plus teenagers only and for adults, teenagers and over 8′s etc and for everyone. If parents taught their children how to behave and took them only where they belonged, this would not be an issue. We host 2 big parties every year. One for entire families and we hire babysitters to watch all the children and make sure there was little kid stuff from food to entertainment. The other was adults only. Unfortunately there were parents who brought their kids to the adults only party and even one neighbor who sent her son to the party but did not come herself. The parents did not supervise their children and inevitably, a child injured herself running full tilt into a door jamb. Running. in the house. So, not ready to behave, not supervised, and not at an appropriate place. So, no more invitations to those parents even to our family-friendly party.
“Quite frankly, I think that parents should get a 5% per kid rebate on payroll taxes.” We already get deductions for each child and each is worth more than 5% of payroll taxes.
“Love the point about the taxes. There are plenty of child-free adults relying on our children to pay taxes upon their retirement to support them through Social Security when they’re of age.” There is no point here about taxes and workers supporting SS. A few private businesses are catering to their customers who are fed up with misbehaving children ruining their evening out. Most of those customers have or had children. They are not banning children from every venue, just from a few places kids do not belong in or in the case of the movie theaters, from some showings. They are not banning these kids from public nor are they hindering these kids from earning a living when they grow up.
I know, I know, your kids are well behaved and should not be punished for the sins of other parent so the restaurant should just make unruly families leave. Unfortunately, by then the unruly family has already harmed the dining experience of everyone there. Pre-emptive action is called for in those establishments.
The problem is parent’s aren’t allowed to discipline . Some don’t know how, some don’t care.
Left/libtard nirvana: No kids allowed– adults don’t want the competition.
My question is, and remains, who speaks for the kids here. And on whose authority are they banned… http://www.andmagazine.com/content/phoenix/11238.html