The Child Free movement is gaining strength, winning over first class at Malaysian Airlines, counting several hotels to it’s dance card, but also restaurants, shopping malls and even movie theaters. Soon, we parents and our kids will all be banned to the back of the bus, just like the colored a couple of decades ago and just like Jews in Europe of the Thirties.
Sounds harsh? What else is it when you start discriminating against people and those attached to them based on physical abilities, height and mental qualities?
When it were only holidays, I could understand, just as I can understand that porn theaters have a 18+ label. What goes on in a lot of the holiday camps for singles or swingers etc is not for children’s eyes. However, this is taking into consideration the child’s sensitivities, whereas child-free restaurants are just blatant discrimination. This is of course still debatable, and one could say that parents are the ones responsible for their children, so they should be making these decisions, but this is the question of law and infringement on individual choice, and may for the topic of another article.
Here it’s not about the feelings of sensitivities of those who cannot advocate for themselves, but about other people’s intolerance. Where are the anti discrimination laws in all this?
|Image: Dougclow on Flickr|
How is it that we have to make laws to prevent people from being discriminated against? We have done so for race, gender and disability, will we have to start passing laws against age discrimination? Or are children worth so little that nobody will bother too?
Do we really have to negotiate, just like people did in the time were blacks were enslaved, that children are people too? Is there any question about that?
So what if these children grow up to discriminate against the child-free elderly? How much mayhem would that create?
A fellow mother left these comments on my Facebook page concerning the issue. I decided to reprint them here, because they are so symptomatic for the 'cause'.
“You people need to realize not everyone is going to think your kids are as adorable and endearing as you do and that they won't care what kind of emotional or developmental issues they may have and that doesn’t make them all bitches, it makes them people with rights and feelings of their own that need some goddamned respect.”
Adherents will tell you that it’s about behavior, but if that were true, then misogynist and alcohol infused men should be banned from everywhere too.
If it’s about disturbing the peace, then there are lots of ill behaved adults that should be removed from the public eye, and then I’m not even talking about people with stomach turning body odor.
There are those who play the victim card: they have paid good money and have such little leisure, and now it has been disrupted by a child, no less.
The odd apologetic person will tell you that it's not all children, it's just
“(...) those squalling ill-behaved brats belonging to overly permissive parents more concerned with not damaging the kids psyche with limits than the rights of others.”
and since you can't select the good from the bad kids, you just ban them all. Just like racists will tell you: "they're not all bad" or "I have a colored friend".
And then I'm not even discussing that the argument of permissiveness is completely ignorant, as it is dominance and violence that creates behavioral issues.
I once sat on a plane for 13 hours next to a guy who had smelly feet, to the point that I preferred lingering in front of the bathrooms. Give me a screaming baby over this every day.
My husband had an 11 hour flight where an old lady crawled on his lap and latched out in her sleep, the entire flight.
Frequent flyers can tell you oodles of these stories. The screaming baby falls into oblivion against the pervert who brushes up against your leg and pants in your ear.
This complaining and this intolerance is not about behavior or disturbance. It’s about the kids. It’s about people being incapable of dealing with them, understanding them or being confronted to their own inner child. On the one hand this is a result from the nearly complete absence of children in the public view, on the other hand, from years of abusive child rearing. Being confronted with a screaming child may remind someone of the 'disciplinary measures' it would hold when they themselves were children. It's not the screaming that makes you uncomfortable, it's the remembrance and the feeling of powerlessness that overtakes us and makes us angry.
That's why we tolerate the smelly and abusive guy at the other table, but not the kid who spills his drink.
Children are children and they sometimes make noise, they have tantrums, they spill drinks. Either you can accept that, or lock yourself up in your flat. And if you feel like you have to move in places that are child free, I suggest you go into therapy to confront the issues that lie in your own childhood.
Better heal your inner child, than rob the children of the present of their childhood.