There is a thread over at Feministe going wild on hating children in public spaces. At the time of writing this the comment thread is already over 300 comments in length. I will get to that post soon here.
But in the meantime I would like to highlight this post from Angus Johnston at student activism:
Public space is not our space. Children, the elderly, and people with disabilities don’t use parks, restaurants, stores, museums, and theaters at our indulgence, because it’s not our space. It’s everyone’s space, and everyone has an equal claim on it.
Mothers, myself included, should be natural (and better) allies for people with disabilities because we both confront an unjust and unreasonable idea that dependence is some kind of deviant behaviour that should be contained within a (nuclear) family unit away from the rest of the supposedly independent and autonomous beings to which the world more properly belongs.
I read the feministe thread last night and found it shocking and revolting. The whole thing stank of privilege.
I’m horrified that someone who has ferociously argued for the rights of women arguing is allowing people to use ‘moos’ in their comment thread (lj, not feministe). It’s fucking abhorrent.
Yes reading some of those comments really confronts you with the nasty reality of so many people’s attitudes. It is frightening and deeply depressing. Still, it makes it clear to me that this isn’t a case of a misunderstanding and now I shall have zero tolerance for such crap.
(And, yes, I shall also get off my bottom re: disability rights.)
I’m childless (childfree? Without children, whatever you call it) and yes, sometimes I find it less than ideal to share my space with children. Just because I am hermit-like in my preferences. Or other adults, able bodied or otherwise. But you know what? That’s the deal. It’s called ‘society’ and if I don’t like it, I have the luxury of staying in my house all day. If I don’t want to take the bus and take pot luck as to who is on it, I can drive. So I dont’ consider that children in public is something I get to complain about, especially since I am going to be expecting some of those same children to bathe me when I am too old to do it myself.
You know what? That’s not even a good argument. I don’t care what ‘use’ other people in the world have to me (although they do, even the ones I don’t enjoy sharing a bus seat with), they are still people, whatever shape, colour, age or ability. And that means that they get to exist and be and use facilites that were built for them as much if not more than for me. And they get to eat in restaraunts and go to concerts. And I do not get to have an opinion about that. Full stop.
In short: yes. Exactly.
Yay Kate.
I was going to say something similar. How’s this for an empowering thought: toddler at the next table bothering you. Leave.
There are many times and places where I have felt that I did not have the right to have my children there, when I had little choice. For instance, the bank, long queue, kids not in day care, I had to entertain them while others sigh and eye roll.
But I don’t think kids should be welcome anywhere, any time. I would be annoyed if I went to the movies, say an 8pm screening, and there were children in there disrupting it. I would be going to that movie to have time out from my kids, so I would not want to be hearing someone else’s.
Yes, there should be far more tolerance of our kids and us, their mothers, in public places.
All the annoyed people were children once too, I can’t believe they forget this, and think they have sprung forth on this planet fully-formed. So, lots of people need to get over themselves.
But there are some times and places where it’s not that cool to have kids around, and I think some restaurants after a certain hour would come into this.
Anna S. I have to say that I don’t really get the exceptions list. You can’t have kids being people with full rights to public space AND an exceptions list. The existence of such a list is akin to saying they are second-class citizens.
Would you argue for such a list to apply to disabled people, the elderly, women…?
A lot of the lists that seem to be offered up by parents themselves (nice restaurants, cinema, ‘after 8pm’, etc) seem built around the idea of having babysitters and an entitlement to childfree time. I think that parents are welcome to take all the time out from their own kids that they need, but no one has an entitlement to child-free time. That very concept is built on excessive adult privilege and relegates children to a lower-class category of human.
There are some interesting assumptions that restaurants and cinemas (and maybe offices and other workplaces) are public spaces. I would query that. Surely they are owned/rented by an individual or company rather than by the public and that those owners have some rights about who comes into them and how they behave when they are there. But I don’t particularly want to press that point.
I am more interested in the ideas circulating about where and when it is appropriate to take children and what behaviour is appropriate when they are there. I have taken my children to work on rare occasions and have also tried to work at home with my children present. Perhaps I am exceptional but I know that I was not as focussed nor as productive when my children were present. I also know that my employees are not as focussed or productive when they bring their children into work. But I accept that from time to time. Some of my employees bring children to work fairly frequently. Problems with this include the children being at risk in a workplace not designed to be safe for them, distracting other staff and clients, resentment of other staff – “why should X get paid the same as me when he/she is only getting through half the work?”
I am glad that my bus driver, surgeon, dentist, barrister have never brought their children to work when I’ve been with them.
I guess I have always thought that one of the characteristics of a civil society is refraining from behaviour that disturbs other people. Protests or civil disobedience for a greater good I would see as an exception to this. I have rarely seen children excluded from any situation where they were not disturbing others. In some societies children seem to learn at an early age how to behave in ways that don’t disturb others in restaurants, shops, businesses, synagogues and mosques. Is this a bad thing? I think not.
@Cristy There are people who do have a genuine need for quiet space though, and it is reasonable to ensure that some public space is made available that is quiet.
The red herring is that lots of people in that thread have conflated “quiet” and “child free”. This implies that children are excluded from quiet spaces, and that is simply not true. Some children need those quiet spaces, and others, like mine, couldn’t tolerate them.
Providing quiet public space is something we should do for everyone’s benefit, and then maybe much of this argument would go away.
Cristy, your point of view is fairly extreme, and perhaps it’s necessary for some to hold extreme views so that the centre can be dragged slightly closer to more tolerance of children in public spaces.
Babysitters do not necessarily need to be paid, I quite often swap babysitting favours with a friend in my neighbourhood. Is this an example of friended-privilege?
Here in NZ I’m involved with Playcentre, a parent co-operative that offers free to very cheap early childhood education for children, by training parents as the teachers, and all taking turns to look after each other’s children, in our very well-equipped centres.
There are many, many evening meetings that Playcentre people attend. Breastfeeding babies are welcome at all times, but it is tacitly acknowledged that were we all to bring our kids along to the meetings, we would find it very hard to make decisions.
There is a mother who comes to our meetings who has many children (not wanting to get too specific) and is parenting alone. Somehow she finds care for her kids so she can attend evening meetings.
I’m just using this example to illustrate that I do find your views extreme, I am already involved in an organisation that is viewed by many as extreme in its focus on parents being involved in all aspects of their children’s lives, namely their early education.
Then count me in for “extreme” too.
Happy to be considered extreme. I also share Peter Singer’s extreme view that the way we treat animals is an example of species-ism and I am well aware that this view is far from the norm.
Personally (and, of course this is a subjective view) I think that you have swallowed the hegemonic belief that children are second-class citizens, even if you temper it pretty bloody well (and good on you for that). We all have our opinions, but mine doesn’t discriminate against a whole class of people and I’m more comfortable with that.
There must be some exemptions, or we’d be looking at some pretty bizarre situations.
R18 movies? (Do they even show those in theatres anymore?) Night clubs?
What about university exams? Children okay to be there? I don’t think any parent would want their children in there with them, but if they did, would that be okay? I say no, because in that situation everyone needs to be concentrating to an extreme degree.
Most of the time, I would say children in a work situation is fine, I have taken mine in to places I have worked on occasion. I have actually been told off by an incredibly intolerant man for bringing my kids into an office to drop off some work I had been doing. My kids were whooping it up a bit, I must admit, but we were only there for 10 minutes, must have contaminated the place in that time.
Honestly, that guy seriously needs a reality check, he was obviously just lashing out at the lowest status person around, and that would of course be a mother with her children.
But this is not to say it’s okay to have kids at work all the time. Work does need to get done.
It also raises a question, are the children allowed wherever the parent goes in an office? So the child of the managing director can go to whatever meetings they go to, but the child of the receptionist goes where they go? Or do all the kids have free reign, in which case they have more access rights than their parents.
There are hierarchies at work as in the rest of society, perhaps this is unjust, and personally I would favour flatter structures where possible.
I suppose I don’t really believe in absolutes.
It fair enough that you don’t believe in absolutes Anna. My argument is that I think that we carve out far too much adult-only space for reasons of privilege rather than need. We don’t ‘need’ quiet kid-free time in public restaurants (no matter how fancy and no matter what the time). It isn’t a right and it certainly should trump the rights of another group to merely exist in those spaces or to behave normally (for them).
There are some occupations that do ‘need’ to concentrate and would have justifiable reasons for keeping many people or other distractions away for all or some of the time (air traffic controllers come to mind for some reason). However, often this so-called need not to be distracted comes from a total lack of flexibility and is an unexamined expression of privilege.
As for standards of behaviour, again my absolutist statements do have some exceptions, but again I think that these are often overstated. Children are quite capable of learning to adapt their behaviour to fit into many different contexts in a way that is not particularly disruptive. However, they need to be given the opportunity to learn this and it can take some time, and we as a community need to be far more flexible about creating spaces that do not impose overly rigid standards of behaviour in order to make this more realistic – just like workplaces (and schedules) ought to be created differently to accommodate the needs of people with caring responsibilities etc…
Final comment before I shut the hell up and stop taking up so much space on someone else’s blog (sorry Blue Milk!).
I really just wanted to apologise to you Anna. My first response to you was unnecessaily harsh. All of the truly lovely women in my mothers group would have less tolerant views about children in public spaces than the ones that you have expressed and I would never respond to them in the same way that I responded to you. It was rude and confrontational and there really us no excuse for behaving like that in person or online.
My sincere apologies.
Though it isn’t aimed at me so I guess it is not for me to say, I still think that is a really nice apology. And for the record, I like you being here.
[...] agenda; one that includes a complete loathing for social services, advocates family violence, is deeply insensitive to its ableism, and refers to women by animal [...]
Hey, no worries, Cristy, I was actually enjoying the debate. In the mummy circles I move in, no-one disagrees with each other, it can be quite wearisome. Sometimes it’s good to be challenged.
Keep up the great blogging, BM.
Thanks Anna (and Blue Milk).