Childfree
July 5th, 2007 |About a half dozen people sent me a link to this post asking for my comment:
Sometimes when I go there to get my afternoon coffee and work during the day for an hour or two, there seems to be many children there as well. And they aren’t quiet. They scream, they yowl, they sound like tomcats fighting in the back alley. This is especially aggravating on a Sunday morning.
So what I’m wondering is, are there any child-free coffee houses in Minneapolis-St. Paul? Because I would frequent them. I was just pondering last week about the possibility of a child-free restaurant too. I would go there too. I would give them business, just to encourage them to stay in business and let them know they are loved and appreciated. It would be nice to have child-free options for coffee and dining in the city.
My comment? I understand what Sascha is saying here and I am sympathetic.
Before we had kids of our own I can’t say that I gravitated to playgrounds, parks and other locations where wild ass kids would congregate. I did not have a lot of experience with little kids and Mrs. Smithers will tell you that I was not at all comfortable being around kids under the age of, oh, 18 years old. To have kids running around crazy when you are trying to relax in peace, be it at a local coffee house or restaurant, at the movie theater or on an airplane, is totally annoying.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a solution. There are a lot of businesses that are not willing to antagonize parents by telling them that their children are not wanted. Restaurants and coffee shops run pretty close to the bone in regards to profit and a number of them would probably go out of business if parents stopped patronizing them. If there was a demand in the marketplace for childfree public places then you can be sure that some businesses would be successfully offering them to those consumers who are interested.
The banning of cell phone use, smoking, and other optional adult behavior is accepted as adults can generally agree on an appropriate time and a place for these activities to take place. The idea of banning children in a public area is fraught with emotion as parents naturally feel like they are being discriminated against simply for being a family. Make no mistake, as this November 2005 New York Times article points out, parents get pretty uppity when you tell them what they can and can’t do with their kids.
The reality, for those looking for childfree public places, is that for a society to prosper it needs to procreate. The result of that procreation is children. However irritating kids may unfortunately be, in order to take advantage of the benefits from living in a society it is also necessary to have to put up with the corresponding irritations of that society.
