THERE'S a chapter missing in the Single Woman's Handbook - Other People's Children and What To Do About Them.
A cafe owner near Newcastle, New South Wales, came under fire from the yummy mummies for daring to declare her coffee shop was only child-friendly for well-behaved children. She made the very valid point that she'd worked ruddy hard to open her business and every time she saw screaming kids ransacking the place while their over-tolerant parents looked on blithely, it "breaks a piece of my heart".
I was waiting for a friend in a restaurant the other day and was unsure if I was in the right place. The waiter, trying to help me out, said: "Does she have kids?" "Yes," I said. "This is the right place then," he replied, going slightly dead behind the eyes.
A sweep of the venue saw a small toddler standing in the middle of a table, another having a tantrum because the salt shaker she'd sprinkled everywhere was empty and sprinkling no more, and a third up in a high chair, behaving beautifully but having created an almighty mess on the floor with his lunch.
It's alarming how easily a child can end up looking like the epicentre of a bomb blast, waves of debris circling out in decreasing volumes. While I have sympathy for adults who have chosen to supervise small humans, it's just not cool to let them blow up in public.
But what do you do, as a child-free adult, when you're trying to have some quiet time with a book and a coffee and your proprietor is not as firm as our cafe owner above? I fully subscribe to the village principle of raising children but I can't imagine too many parents accepting you giving a time out for their darling.
Similarly, what do you do when a wee one of your acquaintance says something their parents might take umbrage at you correcting? From a five-year-old chum: "No, auntie Cat, a girl and a girl can't get married. Only a boy and a girl can get married."
Helping is so easily confused with interfering. Fear of interfering is easily confused with being unsupportive. Most parents, when faced with the child-free, think they know more about children when actually they only know about their own children. It makes it difficult to offer an opinion, particularly when behaviour is bad and tempers are stretched.
Child-free cafes sound delightful but segregating children from the child-free isn't the answer. Once I've worked out what is, I'll write that missing chapter.
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