Jennifer Horgan: We all love our kids but sometimes they should be seen and not heard

I travelled up the country to an arts event some months ago. It was an absolute joy and well worth the six hours I spent alone on a nausea-inducing bus, with a badly-tuned radio and a man sitting in front of me funnelling mucus up and down his nasal passages.

I told myself the event itself would be worth the nausea, the radio and the mucus factory but it very nearly wasn’t and that was down to the parent of a very small child.

The venue for the reading was an upstairs pub in a large town at night. For the first 50 minutes or so the small child was very-nearly-almost quiet. But by the end, the toddler was in full-blown monologue mode. I couldn’t believe it when he wasn’t scooped up immediately and escorted out the door in a flurry of parental apologies.

At one point, a speaker had to pause and wait for quiet. The next speaker shouted their work over the babble. I looked to the parent, feeling increasingly anxious about the blatant injustice of it all; they smiled and carried on gazing at their curly-haired Adonis.

Looking back now I think that maybe the organisers could at least have had a quiet word, but in all honesty I’m annoyed with myself for saying nothing in defence of the speakers.

I suppose I wanted to be nice to the parent, perhaps I could have let them know in a kind way.

What about the entire audience? Should any of us have intervened?

It says something that we all endured the experience quietly.

Parenting has become an act of absolute individualism, hasn’t it? Not only does it no longer ‘take a village,’ the village has fallen absolutely silent. A best friend can’t comment these days. Parenting is the ultimate no-go zone. It is each to their own and then some.

Isn’t there something sad in that? For children especially? That every childhood is going to be absolutely dictated by individual parents with no input from broader society, family or friends?

Maybe we’d be better off offering advice to anyone, friend or stranger when their parenting gets in the way of them being considerate, nice, empathetic people.

But then I remember the unsolicited advice I used to get when I was at my lowest, sleep-deprived ebb of parenting. The ‘maybe she’s hungry’ comments when my baby cried.

There is, sadly, no mute button for comments in real life especially when it comes to parental advice but perhaps some guidance is acceptable?

Potentially, we need to be clearer about who attends certain events and frequents certain venues. But what of well-behaved children? Isn’t it ageist to exclude them? If the toddler had been quiet, there would have been no issue. I imagine this is why parents get angered by ‘no children’ weddings. They assume that their child will only add to and not take from the occasion.

In the end, it has to come back to the parents doing their best, doesn’t it? Perhaps a theatre rule should apply. Theatres routinely refuse admission to children under two years old, unless it’s a children’s show, as silence is needed and it’s unfair to expect a child young to reliably keep silent. Maybe this theatre rule should extend beyond theatres to any space where there’s an expectation of calm and quiet.

I don’t like to think I’m saying children should be seen and not heard. But maybe I am saying that some of the time.

I remember staying in a fancy hotel a while back. It was a serious treat. I went down to have my breakfast with a book, looking forward to really luxuriating in the quiet, my three children being looked after miles away. The silence was golden — it might as well have been, with the cost of the place. I told myself it was worth it.

Then a family with their own three small children arrived and sat in front of me, breaking my moment with the sea beyond and very soon crushing the silence with their high-arched squeals. I gobbled my delicately poached egg and very quickly left for the sanctuary of my hotel room.

Should there have been a separate ‘small children’ room? Should they have been admitted at all? Should the parent have demanded good behaviour or taken them out? Or should I have been more tolerant?

But why bring small children to an adult hotel, a space created as a getaway, a haven of silence, far removed from the reality of life and adult responsibilities? I genuinely don’t get it. Unless people are so rich that these are just the hotels they frequent? Well, fine. But consider the circumstances of other people too, for whom this is a once-in-a-long-time kind of treat.

You know, be nice. Or at least be aware.

It’s in more everyday spaces too. Like hairdressers and nail salons. These are the places people, mostly women, go to get away from their responsibilities, to enjoy that little bit of frivolity between work-work, the housework, the care work, the schoolwork, the everything-else work. It’s not self-care; it’s self-preservation. The people that bring small children into salons, dumping them with staff or leaving them free to run up and down screaming their heads off are quite simply not being nice.

And this brings me to my final point sometimes people can’t afford childcare or they can’t be away from their kids at all. And that is really, really hard. It is tough to not get a break. People without money and with children deserve to be supported by the government, their communities and their families. That’s when the village is needed. It is an incredibly difficult, non-stop job.

But it’s not everybody’s job all of the time. And it’s not fair to think that a single baby or child should have the freedom to change the atmosphere or experience of a very quiet venue or solemn event for absolutely everyone. And the ‘but that’s real life’ argument doesn’t hold up when people have paid or made a huge effort for it to be something different, just for once.

But if it’s simply a case of a parent not wishing to ever separate from their child, well then that’s a choice with consequences. You might have to miss out on certain things from time to time. That needs to be okay.

We must protect our individual freedom but we must also recognise that line when our ‘freedom to’ crosses into somebody else’s ‘freedom from.’ The unwritten rules of society — those unspoken, quotidian little rules of thumb — say more about us than we think. They offer us opportunities to be nice to one another — something worth protecting.