On child hate and feminism
NS November 3rd, 2009
Before I became a mother I had opinions about a lot of things on which I’ve since done an about-face. For example:
- I thought I’d always wear shoes with at least a little bit of a heel and would never, EVER wear flat slip-ons just because they’re more comfortable and convenient
- I thought people who wore trousers anywhere above their hipbones were tragically uncool
- I thought parents were selfish for taking their pushchairs on the bus or train at rush hour and should be relegated to only using public transport at times when the Busy, Important People weren’t around
- I thought babies and children could easily be ‘controlled’ and that any kid who threw a tantrum, screamed or cried incessantly was a brat who needed to be immediately removed from the vicinity of my ears and my precious public space, of which I was utterly convinced I had dibs on over a snot-faced two-year-old
Some of these naive thoughts were a result of merely being young and inexperienced, but others didn’t even register as being perhaps a tad selfish until I became a parent and gained a new perspective.
I now know that wearing heels while pushing a 35 lb. toddler in a pushchair up a steep hill, in the rain, with the week’s shopping hanging off the handles and a crying baby attached to your front in a sling calls not only for flat shoes, but sturdy, comfortable, weather-resistant, puke-wipable, hard-wearing, sensible stompers.
I now know that moms wear ‘mom jeans’ because the hip-slung look isn’t really compatible with post-baby bellies.
I now know that parents (and kids) have just as many places to be and just as much right to use public transport, dine at a restaurant, have coffee on a Sunday morning, go to the cinema, shop at the mall or have lunch at the pub as those rushing to and from work and those without children.
But if I’d never become a parent, would I have wised up about how unrealistic my expectations of children in public were? Would I have softened my hardened stance as I aged and interacted with my friends’ children? Most likely, yes. Because as much as our society loves to divide us into Us vs. Them (parents vs. non-parents), with neither side being able to fathom what it’s like for those on the opposite side of the fence, it’s much more complex than that.
First of all, there are different attitudes towards children from those who don’t have them. There are the ones who want them but can’t have them for whatever reason (illness, infertility, etc..); those who don’t ever want children of their own but who like children, have children in their lives or are at least kindly tolerant of them; those who will probably have children of their own someday but are perhaps naive about the realities of parenting so may be a bit simplistic or harsh in their views; those who are openly hostile towards children because of their own fears, insecurities and a wealth of negative messages about kids and being a parent that they have internalised over the years; and those who are openly hostile towards children because they truly think they are sub-human monsters not worthy of existence and who would be happy to return to the Victorian motto of “seen and not heard,” with “seen” being a concession to letting the little beasts out of their cages at all.
Of all my friends and acquaintances who are not parents, the vast majority fall into the first three categories. They may not have first-hand experience of parenting but they generally like children, may even have spent a lot of time around them and caring for them, and have absolutely no issues with their presence itself. They may, as I said, be a bit naive to some of the realities of day-to-day life with small children, but that’s okay. I wouldn’t expect them to know all about it, or even want to. As long as they’re cool with me living my life and my children living theirs and us all mixing it up together and coexisting in public spaces, we’re golden. Any misconceptions or misunderstandings about parenting (or not parenting) between us can be cleared up 99% of the time with a quick conversation or by gently sharing a different viewpoint. Even if we can’t totally understand where the other person is coming from, we can certainly sympathise.
But the “seen and not heard” people, the ones (like many of the commenters on this article) who talk about children needing to be smacked, drugged or threatened into submission; the ones who talk about kids needing muzzles and leashes becasue they are like dogs; the ones who think that if there are not crayons and clowns in the restaurant, kids should not be allowed in; the ones who would slap a crying child in Wal-Mart or shout “Shut the hell up, you little brat!” to a 3-year-old crying in the grocery store checkout line (as I witnessed one day last summer)…these people are not just lacking perspective, they are bloody psychotic. Anyone who would advocate such violence and punitive measures against children just to make them behave the way THEY want them to is not only controlling, hateful, self-absorbed and deluded, but frightening to a degree that it makes me nervous to know they’re out there among us. Thankfully, people who are truly this hateful towards children aren’t great in number.
But the people I really want to talk about are the ones in the penultimate category — the ones who are offended by and sometimes hostile towards children as a result of their own fears, insecurities, defensiveness or having internalised all of the negative messages conveyed to us on a regular basis about children and parenting. Again, even those who fall into this category will be varied and have different reasons for their disdain.
Some may simply be assholes, the kind of people so filled with hate and anger that they enjoy taking it out on those smaller than them or more vulnerable. Let’s face it, kids are pretty easy targets because they’re relatively defenseless against adults with their adult world and their adult rules and their adult size. They’re at our mercy on the bottom rung and they know it, which must be a pretty horrible way to navigate the world. I think we all remember how frustrating and unfair it felt, even as teenagers, to be restricted, disallowed and banned from doing the things we wanted to do because of some arbitrary rule or simply becuase someone bigger and more powerful than us said “Because I said so.” If it’s that frustrating as a 15-year-old, imagine how much more frustrating it must be for a two or three-year-old who doesn’t have the verbal capacity to communicate her concerns in a legitimate way or even keep a handle on her emotions as she reacts to situations she doesn’t understand.
Flaunting one’s control over children as a means of establishing and exerting power for the sole purpose of letting them know their ‘place’ is a type of power-tripping narcissism that I just can’t understand, though it is obvious from the remarks of some child-haters that this is exactly what they expect parents (and any adult a child comes into contact with, for that matter) to do, so as to preserve their “right” to quiet cafes, pavements free of mobility devices for babies and eateries reserved for the exclusive use of those who understand that etiquette requires them to not slurp their soup, shout with joy when dessert comes, or take a walk around the restaurant to check out what others are doing when they become bored.
Many may be (like I was in my early 20s before I had kids), terrified of what children represent and how they might affect our lives, even before we have them or if we never have them at all. Women particularly are prone to fretting about how having children (or even being perceived as wanting to have or being capable of having them) will result in a loss of power and standing in the professional or academic world, a loss of personal freedom and a loss of our selves. Because to a certain extent, it’s true. We do lose a lot of power when we become mothers. We gain it in other areas, sure, but becoming a mother automatically throws a kink in the patriarchal plan, the hierarchal system we were operating under, where men come first, then women who are able to act and live ‘like men’ and then, languishing somewhere at the bottom of the food chain with unpaid interns and temporary staff, the mothers.
The mothers and their shortened hours and maternity leaves and special requests and general pain-in-the-ass-ness…they’re really only kept on at some places because it’s against the law to fire them when they get pregnant. Even employers who truly value their workers and consider themselves progressive find sweat forming on their upper lips when they see someone of childbearing age and possessing a uterus walk through the doors for an interview. It doesn’t matter if she has children or doesn’t, she is a liability. And childless women know this just as well as those who have reproduced.
I remember looking at this couple with their crying child in an art museum one time, when I was maybe 24, and wondering what the hell they were thinking by bringing him there and how they should’ve gone somewhere more family-friendly for his sake. Automatically, my brain registered the connection I had just made between having children and either being scorned for taking them to places not necessarily geared up specifically for kids, or having to stay home altogether. To me, the choice was pretty clear: have fun and have a life, or have a kid. It didn’t dawn on me that having to choose between those two things is unfair, purposely exclusionary and inherently sexist since women are affected by having and caring for children (in a social sense) much more than men.
My perception of the sacrifices and personal losses of parenthood was confirmed by other things I witnessed and observed. I saw how the only woman at work who had a child was demoted after taking her second maternity leave because she had to leave at 5 on the dot to pick her kids up from daycare. I saw how everyone rolled their eyes as she picked up her bags and logged off of her computer, even though she’d been at her desk since 7.30 compared to our 9am, and had worked through the lunch break that we’d all spent at the pizzeria next door.
I believed that any woman who stayed at home to take care of her children was wasting her education, subjugating herself to her husband and would inevitably become completely boring and obsessed with her children. I had absolutely no idea about anything to do with the physical, emotional, social and financial repurcussions of pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, maternity leave, the costs and difficulties of finding quality childcare, or the bonding and primary caregiver role that is so vital to a new baby’s development.
I had no idea how hard it could be to take a child on a simple errand without incident, when it wasn’t nap time, meal time, or rush hour. I had no idea how much pressure parents are under to keep their children well-behaved, well-mannered, quiet, compliant and taking up as little space as possible, and what kind of mental strain that puts both the parents and the children under. I had no idea that one day I would be thinking back to the glares I have shot at chattering children or the way I would sometimes mutter under my breath “Jesus, these women and their pushchairs, they think they own the street,” as two women with prams came my way, and I would be ashamed of how I behaved, would like to find those cheerful but noisy children and those women just struggling to make it through the day with their newborn babies and unwieldy prams and apologise for my asshattery.
It’s clear to me now that I was the one acting petulant and selfish, not those women or those children just going about their lives. But why did I have so much antipathy towards them? Why did I feel a self-righteous sense of anger at the fact that I couldn’t understand or control what they were doing or experiencing?
The real answer, if I’m honest? Fear. Fear of the unknown, of being in that position someday and feeling scrutinized and picked apart and passed over and talked about. Insecure because I wasn’t sure if parethood was something I wanted and if it wasn’t, why was I ever-so-slightly disappointed when a pregnancy test the month before came out negative? And if it was something I wanted, why wasn’t I being struck down with the “biological urge” or “maternal instinct” I’d been told I should be feeling by now? More importantly, if I did decide to become a parent, how much of my ideals and my freedome and how many pieces of my true self would I have to wave goodbye to, as I’d come to believe was inevitable?
For self-proclaimed feminists in particular, this can be a real minefield of conflicting issues. On one hand we’ve been fed this message all our lives that we can do and be anything and that women are worth more than the domestic drudgery and single-minded devotion to childrearing often associated with marriage and motherhood in times past. In order to reinforce this message, has it become necessary for some women to convince themselves that they are better than mere housewives, more than “just” mothers and that children and parents are the problem, not a society that demeans and undervalues both? Because admitting that motherhood went from overrated to undervalued in 40 years flat isn’t something many of us want to acknowledge. Not many of us want to admit that even though the mainstream women’s movement certainly isn’t to blame for the way mothers and children are treated, it hasn’t done much to help them either.
And there on the other hand are the messages we are constantly bomarded with that say we are the ‘natural’ caregivers, that we have these biological bombs in our wombs that will make us go baby-making-crazy eventually, that we will be bereft and barren and bitter if we don’t become mothers. Even if we actively reject this message, know that it is sexist drivel, some of it inevitably sinks in and makes us doubt our decisions, our bodies and our roles in society. Even if one knows intellectually that a decision to not have children is a perfectly legitimate one, is it any wonder that so many non-parent women feel they have to be on the defensive from those who think them selfish or weird; that perhaps they employ the ol’ “attack before you are attacked” method of self-defense to ward off potential hurts?
Feminists (or feminst-minded women) in particular, I believe, are more prone to feel conflicted about children and motherhood and therefore are perhaps so emphatically resistant to the pigeon-holing as to risk entering into enemy territory, the very ideology that feminism deplores, where oppression and hatred reign supreme. Because — and let me be clear here — hatred of children, or expecting them to behave in a specific, prescripted, pre-approved way, or denigrating mothers by calling them “braindead housewives” or “breeders” is nothing short of oppression.
You won’t (or, at least, shouldn’t) gain any street cred or merit badges amongst the feminist in-crowd if you proudly declare yourself free from the yoke of mothering, or make jokes about muzzling children, or shoot dirty looks to families in cafes where you’re trying to do Important Things like read Salon’s Broadsheet, where even people who bother to read feminist sites say things like:
Fuck her and fuck her brat. I am goddamn sick and tired of screaming, misbehaving children making my time in public places a misery. Kudos to Southwest for having the intestinal fortitude to do the obvious thing: Boot their asses off the damned plane. If I’d been there, I would have given the flight crew a standing ovation.
Because you know what? Participating in child-bashing is participating in the oppression of a vulnerable group. By only “allowing” them into your space (be it political, social or public) through forcing them to adhere to a set of arbitrary standards is no better than the way whites told people of colour in the 50s and 60s that sure, they could be one of them… but only if they agreed to adopt white dress, speech, habits, customs and so on. So long as they were Trying To Fit In, the reigning race would reluctantly allow them to enter their space, but it had to be by their rules.
Even today, as soon as a comb gets tucked into an afro, or a pair of trousers on a black ass are found sagging, or the urban vernacular of a group of dark-skinned folks gets too complicated and labeled ‘threatening’, some white people get ucomfortable and that’s when things can get Ugly. It’s also like the people who claim to be okay with gay couples but then balk and gag when they see two men holding hands or kissing and say: “I respect your right to exist and all but you don’t need to shove it in my face! Keep that crap at home!”
Saying you support a group of people while at the same time defending your right not to have to interact with those people if they don’t fall in line with your expectations is just a superficial veneer of “acceptance” that means jack shit when it comes to real inclusion.
So no, you’re not really a progressive or a feminist or a liberal, all-encompassing sort if you also openly declare your disdain for children. Threatening to enact violence against them or their parents is not funny, it’s not cool and it’s not right. In fact, it’s really fucking hurtful. Not just on a personal level but on the whole, to women.
Instead of ripping on each other for our respective reproductive choices, let’s remember what’s really holding us back and work together to make it so having children or not having children are equally legitimate choices that don’t limit or ostracize us in any way.
Image credit: kayepants, via a Creative Commons license
- Child Hate , Feminist Fury , I Bitch Therefore I Am , Parenting 101
- Comments(20)
It really saddens me that anyone can be that vile about another human being. I have a very simplistic approach – live and let live. I’m a mum doing her best to teach her daughters to be confident, happy and compassionate, not to judge people on their circumstances and to respect other people’s choices. So when I then read comments/articles by people who say they ‘hate’ children, it does upset me. My simplistic attitude was summed up in a piece here:
http://www.havealovelytime.com/2009/04/im-sorry-does-my-childrens-presence-offend-you.html
Thanks for a thought-provoking, honest and brave piece. Personally I’m baffled as to why anyone would base a hatred of a whole group of people on the behaviour of some, if that same prejudice was directed at a group of grown-ups, people would be outraged and rightly so.
Contrary to popular belief, as a mum, I do not consider women who have chosen not to have had children to be on the wrong path or ‘selfish’ so it really does irk me if someone then seeks to categorise/demonise/generalise about parents and children.
I couldn’t agree more.
I started reading the comments, got 4 pages in and had to click away. The hate was just oozing off the page.
I’m shocked and outraged that people could be so openly hostile towards children. It makes me sick to the stomach.
I agree with Linda’s live and let live sentiments.
Thanks for writing such a brilliant and thought provoking post.
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by LindaSJones: RT @thenoblesavage New blog post: On child hate and feminism (warning: very long!) http://bit.ly/1rJveA (good stuff…)…
Just read the piece you pointed us to. It beggars belief. These people clearly have serious issues – as you stated – and are walking around with so much pent-up rage and fear that they are just looking for targets upon whom they can vent their spleen so they can feel better about themselves. Obviously, since children are smaller than they are, who better?
I remember how a family member once suggested that I give one of my misbehaving sons a smack. I asked if she would smack an adult. The answer was no, of course. So why then, I asked, would she hit someone so much smaller than she was? (Note; I do exclude running into a busy road in front of a car as exempt from this non-smack on the bottom approach…) In any case, I suppose my point is that you should treat children with similar levels of respect to adults – although you put it so much better. As ever…
This line: “Participating in child-bashing is participating in the oppression of a vulnerable group.” And the two paragraphs after it say it all. Thanks for articulating it in that way.
~Tara
@Linda – I enjoyed your post on this topic, thanks for the link!
@Insomniac Mummy – Yeah, my jaw was really on the floor with some of them. I kept waiting for someone to jump in and tell them they were demented but everyone just keep piling on and getting worse and worse! Disgusting.
@Potty Mummy – Oh my, I don’t know what I’d be tempted to say to someone who told me I should smack my child, but I’m guessing it would look like this —> @^!£)
@TheOrganicSister – Thank you for commenting, I’m glad it struck a chord with you.
oh God. I too was one of those women who knew EXACTLY how I was going to parent – and it wasn’t going to be like most of my friends, who seemed to be allowing their children to run riot. Ha ha ha. How I look back and laugh now. Most of my issues with my children’s behaviour now is not actually with their behaviour at all, but with how I perceive their behaviour is being judged when we are in public, and therefore how I am being judged as a mother. Sometimes I feel I go over the top in terms of trying to discipline them or corral natural, over-exhuberant tendencies purely because at that moment in time I can feel the intensity of the stares and want them to magically morph into Little Lord Fauntleroys really for my benefit alone.
I have flown with my children for 8-10 hours several times. On every occasion we have had the people sitting near us call the attendant and ask to be moved. I have been stunned by surrounding adult’s rudeness, even though the boys have predominantly been very well behaved. Now I have also flown to and from the UK alone and I must admit I have prayed to a higher power not to be seated near kids, because I really am craving some quiet time during the flight. But I have much more sympathy for parents in all situations now – because I have found that my children are not animals that can be controlled in every situation to act and behave exactly as adults wish them to.
Great, great post. Has given me so much to think about. Thank you.
While I agree with everything you say and have close-up experience with child-haters, I do have issues with children in public places. But, I don’t blame the children, obviously, but the parents.
If you’ve decided to take your children to a museum and they lose interest and start behaving in a way that’s disturbing to other visitors, I really think you should leave! The same goes for restaurants. Planning is key to visiting museums, going to the theatre and restaurants with children. We visit the National Gallery or another museum every time we’re in London. But we only visit one section and prepare ahead. Last time we looked only at Rembrandt and his contemporaries to compare the way they used natural light. At the previous visit to London we looked at mummies at British Museum because he’s a bit obsessed with Egypt. And next time it’ll be the National Gallery again to see Van Gogh, who they’ve discussed at school. He’s always amazed to see the real paintings as opposed to the ones in books and on websites.
It is of course different on a plane, but children can be well prepared for this experience or not so well. And parents can stock the children up on sugar, so they go wild, or choose not to. If I allow my son a Coke, I know there’s a good chance he’ll go mad, so it’s something I never allow on e.g. a plane, a long car or train ride. Also, you must be prepared to do your bit to entertain them, not just sit and watch a film and hush them all the time as I’ve often seen parents do on long-haul flights.
I’ve had a strict and unbendable rule about Supermarket/shopping behaviour. If they nag, they don’t get anything. They can ask once, nicely, and I might very well say yes, if what they ask for is reasonable. But just one sound of nagging and the tap is closed for the day. It works. Had an episode or two when they were quite small and just left the store immediately without the shopping. A small price to pay for years of untroubled shopping!
With both my children (boys, now 20 &
I know I sound horrible, but while I think that children should definitely be allowed to be children – to play, to sing, to run around, to say “unspeakable things”, I also think that we should teach them early to show respect for other people.
That said, I hate my neighbours for their petty little complaints and raised eyebrows. Here are some of the things they’ve complained about (the board of directors where we live always brush them off and suggest they go live in a place with no children, so we’re generally well looked after!):
THAT boy is careening around the estate on his scooter and ruining the asphalt (an asphalt company were called out and testified that the marks in the asphalt were actually caused by cars with power steering!)
THAT boy draws on the asphalt with chalk and makes the whole place look like a council estate (she shouldn’t have said that, the chairman grew up in a council estate, ha)
THAT boy and his friends made a terrible noise all day. (he had 7 boys for b’day party for exactly 2 hours btw 2-4 on a Saturday afternoon. Outside.)
THAT boy has kept us awake all morning with his bouncing ball. (He’s much too big for a bouncing ball and was watching TV, it was the next door neighbour who had his grandchildren visiting. But he’s very rich and influential so she didn’t complain to him.)
Great Post. You know the saddest thing about it all? The little boy was so excited to be seeing his dad he was shouting “Go Plane Go” and “I want daddy”. Annoying perhaps, but hardly a tantrum.
Beautiful and poignant. Thanks for sharing!
i’ve softened a lot in the last 4 years due to becoming an aunt and realizing that “controlling” a zealous toddler is just wishful thinking. even the most well-behaved children act up, get tired and cranky, cry, and don’t always recognize when to use their “inside voices”. i would hope that for the most part, we (me now representing the entirety of the single, childless population – holla!) are tolerant and understanding when we’re on a flight with a child who is being seen AND heard. i sympathize with the parents who are looking around haggardly to see if they are getting death stares while trying to get their child to behave. though i may joke about encounters with children in public places, i truly only get annoyed when the parents can’t seem to be bothered with telling little bobby that it is not ok to drop trow and poo on the floor (yes, i have honestly seen this happen) or let little janie know that running up and down the aisles of the airplane and throwing toys at people is not ok.
that said, i have to admit that i do think there are certain places that adults should think strongly about before bringing along their kids. for example, my favorite sushi restaurant does not cater to kids – no children’s menu, nothing entertaining in the way of crayons or balloons, etc. not that i mind if someone brings a baby in a stroller in, but to have a toddler running around in there would be a nightmare. the place is small, cramped even, and you can barely get in and out of your booth without knocking over something on the table next to you. i think the reality is that there are just certain places where kids may not like to be, regardless of what the parents think. coffee shops, most restaurants, the grocery store, bookstores, etc? yes, of course kids should be there. i just think parents should consider the place before bringing along the children.
Thanks for this article. This one, and several others I found the last couple of days, are awesome. You (and the others) put into words what I have felt and believed, that children are people. I never thought of it that way because somehow I didn’t realize that others didn’t think of them as people. Silly me!
It really is that simple: children are people and they deserve to be treated as such. That doesn’t mean treated as little adults, which they aren’t, but treated as people who act they way they should based on their age and ability. And it means parents need to think about that, but there also needs to be some cultural shift in thinking.
I hope you are right that the child haters are a minority, but sometimes it does not seem that way. It seems that in polite society they might hide their bigotry, but when they are speaking freely with others (non-parent others) or on the Internet, they feel no shame in being a bigot. I know people who do not hate children, but still talk and joke about how children should be muzzled. It troubles me greatly to hear that kind of talk, especially from people I know and consider friends (though they don’t usually say it directly to me). I wouldn’t classify any of them as child haters, and yet they must think it is funny or somehow acceptable to make a comment like that. To me, that is way more disturbing than the assholes. Those I can just ignore because, well, they are just assholes.
[...] On child hate and feminism [...]
I went to the library for the first time today and my son was in high gear: there were humongous stuffed animals, lots of books, a new place to explore. He was yelling all sorts of sweet, incoherent toddlerisms as we wandered the aisles and I felt clenched.
He was perfectly normal. I was definitely not.
And to be fair, no one gave us dirty looks or asked us to leave, but I was still very aware of how misplaced we were. This was NOT a place for a toddler and I felt under a spot light… and hated it.
I mean, why can’t I wander the reference aisles of the grown-up side just because I have a noisy, chattering, little person with me, right?
I hear what another commenter said about timing and respect, but sometimes they don’t always align with convenience and others’ ideas of convenience in general, hence feeding to the flames of “kids don’t belong here.”
Last year I did hours of research to find a high-end, “family friendly” restaurant for Thanksgiving. It was to be our first restaurant-Thanksgiving, but I was SO concerned about ruining any other diners’ experience that I explained to multiple people about my needs for an early dinner and an accepting staff. It seems to me that if I’m willing to pay, I should be allowed to bring whomever I choose and not bat an eye at it. Toddler in tow or not, right?
In any case, brilliant post. Thought provoking and ire-raising. The best kind of writing!
[...] Savage has a great post titled On child hate and feminism, talking about her impressions of motherhood/children before she had children and why feminists [...]
Great post, very honest and perceptive. I too was part of the like children but very naive with such unrealistic expectations of how I would raise them. Now I’m a mum to two I’m quite embarrassed when I look back at some of the thoughts I had. Of how I considered some friend’s children to be “great”, basically because they fitted in with what we wanted to do as adults, whilst other friend’s children I thought were a “handful” because they didn’t want to sit for hours whilst we caught up.
Since becoming a mum at times I have been overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers who want to engage with me and my two sons. But other times (and sadly it feels more often that the positive encounters) I feel so beleaguered by looks and comments about my spirited little boy. I am trying to parent him in a way that means he knows it is good to respect other people, to be kind to others and to teach him that people look and behave in a thousand different ways and that this difference is good, but it’s hard when other people don’t afford him that same respect. It’s good to have posts like this to buck me up on a bad day. Because my son won’t be two forever, but when he is far from toddlerdom he will hopefully still have a sense of respect and kindness for others.
[...] mother-blaming and child hate in some pockets of feminism. Many others have spoken eloquently and thoughtfully about this before me, so I’m not going to reiterate what they’ve said. Long story [...]
[...] mother-blaming and child hate in some pockets of feminism. Many others have spoken eloquently and thoughtfully about this before me, so I’m not going to reiterate what they’ve said. Long story short, I [...]
[...] mother-blaming and child hate in some pockets of feminism. Many others have spoken eloquently and thoughtfully about this before me, so I’m not going to reiterate what they’ve said. Long story short, I [...]
People who say children and accompanying adults should be totally excluded from anywhere bar a pigsty are frankly idiots. They are suggesting that parents’ lives should revolve around their children, a recipe for spoiled brats surely? I think the recipe for a healthy, happy child is the exact reverse; the parent goes about their business and, if they are good, the child may tag along. Everything is both a game and a lesson for the child; a lesson in when to shut up at the library, a game in how to add up or plan meals when getting the groceries. By ghettoizing children away from the real world, child-haters are in fact rendering children MORE spoiled, because every decision revolves around them instead of the parents. Child-haters are also lowering the odds children learning proper behavior at a young age. It should be their aim to model right behavior and they should be pleased to have children in front of whom to do it. They should also feel free, when a child is being inappropriate, to speak to them. This shows the child the respect you would any human who was upsetting you and is a lot more dignified than bitching under your breath. Children are mostly good-natured and keen to please, and if you approach them reasonably they will cooperate. The idea is bring them up to your level instead of sinking to theirs by throwing a tantrum about it.
I went to “nice” places, museums, Broadway shows etc with my parents as soon as I could walk. We always had crayons and coloring books in case we got bored. It was understood that we were not to misbehave, if we did, next time we had to go to a babysitter. Since we much preferred hanging with our parents, who got to go to cool places, we behaved. I was typing up letters at mom’s office when I was 8, then if she wasn’t ready to go, I’d sit in the waiting room and talk to the non-contagious patients. Many were quite lonely old folks and they loved it.
If children never interact with adults except teachers and parents, they will not learn to converse at an adult level anything like as fast as they are capable. Obviously they need their own spaces sometimes, but just shutting them out is silly and counter-productive.