Soft play annoyances

[Ohheyitsme1]

What annoys you most about these hellholes places?

For me, it’s people wearing socks with holes in them. I don’t want to see your overgrown big toenail poking out of its cave in the toddler area, mate! You’ll have someone’s eye out! 😆

Parents who let their little darlings run loose & then don't look up from their phones for 2 hours to see said darling putting a child half their age in to a headlock.

Parents who take their toddlers into the older section when its busy. On a Wednesday morning when the big kids are at school... its OK. But not when the older kids are simply being old kids.

And the reverse of this - 8 year olds in the toddler bit. Beat it!

Soft play structures where there are a million places a small child could hide and areas that are basically inaccessible to adults.

I had an experience lately where a woman was so oblivious to her own children that they’d surrounded my child and physically assaulted him. They were much older and bigger than my child. He was sat crying on the floor and it was so heartbreaking to see. My child has special needs and didn’t understand why this was happening. Other parents had approached me and told me that they’d been essentially harassing my child throughout the softplay structure. I calmly asked the children to come with me and show me where their mum was and I told her what they’d done. She weedily said to them “what have I told you about hitting?” And let them carry on playing. The sight of my child cowering at the aggression of these children bothered me for days afterwards. Weak parenting really grinds my gears.

I was going to say the opposite - older children hurtling around the toddler area. The toddler areas are usually tiny and shit whereas the main area is massive and brilliant, there's just no need to take over that space too.

Also individual adults sitting alone at big tables. There's never enough seating. But this is a bugbear everywhere tbf!

@Ohheyitsme1 and @aSofaNearYou it definitely works the other way too. The whole reason for the separate parts is so the little ones can play without being hurt and the big ones can play without hurting the little ones.

Fortunately my Soft play days are over but I think it should have been law that there was an easy way to the top of the biggest slide so the parents could easily test it. 😁The best bit about managing a soft play was testing the equipment with no kids about.

@aSofaNearYou . With the individual adults taking up whole tables thing, I just plonk myself down on the other side of the table with a half-hearted "Is it OK if I sit here?"

I've only ever had one person refuse (apparently they needed all three spare seats for the kids in the playframe 🙄). They did have the grace to look a bit sheepish though when I then tried to feed baby DC2 standing up and the grandmother at the next table jumped up to give me her seat.

Big kids in the under 2s area!

another vote here for big kids in the little kids area, and parents who don't give a toss

I have to go to soft play for work (nanny) AND ‘leisure’ because I now have a toddler. I’ve seen it all. And I’m forever telling big kids to take a hike out of the toddler area, whether their parents like their kids being told or not.

Big pirate themed one near work charges £8.50 a session and sells Prosecco. Amazing how lax those parents get on a Friday afternoon!

Worst soft play ever was finding a dirty nappy in the bottom of the ball pit 🤢

Where the only access to the slide is via those ridiculous rollers that you don't stand a chance of getting through if you're wider than a stick insect, and you have a small child that refuses to go on it alone.

I need to find a soft play that sells Prosecco

Oh when you get parents totally helicoptering their children and following an inch behind them going ‘careful!’ at all times. It’s such okay, not a construction site. The point is if they fall over they’re not likely to hurt themselves 🤣

*soft play

Big kids in the toddler area is number 1 I think, it’s just so incredibly dangerous and the children who seem to want to go into this area are always feral. Mocking them for being babies usually shifts them.
But soft play lay out usually is to blame for this. Quite a few round here have the only ball pit in the toddler area, it’s absolutely stupid.
Lack of staff to enforce the rules.
Generally other parents not being arsed to parent.

It's really awful that this happened to your DS, but how did it happen and how did it require multiple parents to approach you if you weren't oblivious too?

Agree with parents not keeping at least half an eye on their young kids who proceed to be bolshy with little toddlers I.e. pushing them off things, out of the way etc
Also when with DS1 the kids who LOVE babies so stick to him like glue. Yes it’s very sweet and they’re not being bad but sometimes it’s a bit bloody much.

In a David Lloyd soft play area, there were older kids who were screaming every couple of seconds. The rest of us Parents were going over to check if it was our children and looking around in annoyance to see if there were parents sitting on their phone. There wasn't. Parents nowhere to be seen - they must have been in another section of the club. I left with a really bad headache.

I was in the younger kids bit with my other children and my husband was grabbing a fruit shoot from the vending machine. I wasn’t entirely oblivious because I saw the incident myself from the ground. The other parents who told me about it were inside the soft play structure. This parent was sat on her phone on a table round the corner where you can’t see inside the structure at all. Her children obviously have form for this behaviour as she was not at all surprised and her response addressed the fact that she’d previously told them off for hitting. I didn’t feel the need to helicopter my child because he’s not a bully, but if you know your kid is likely to hit others then surely you wouldn’t sit on a table far away where you can’t supervise them?

The other parents approached me after the fact to tell me what had happened prior to the incident I witnessed. Sorry if that wasn’t clear from my post. My children are well behaved and are raised not to bully others so I suppose it’s my bad for expecting this from other parents. Maybe I should have remained inside the structure to safeguard my child from the offspring of parents who can’t raise theirs properly?

I’ve seen two incidents. A small group
of older children start running around playing on the soft play and decided it was theirs, they owned it. They kept one punching one child for being on the soft play, I remember the child’s DP saying how worried they were that DC was being picked on.
The other was an older boy on his own blocking some of the soft play and being physically aggressive with any smaller or more vunerable children who tried to get past him, one DP actually shouted at him but the boys DP just kept her head down and pretended it wasn’t happening

Parents in the frame. It's soft play, it's for the kids not the adults. 🤦

Parents with over 5s in the older area constantly.
Toddlers in the over 5s area
And big kids in under 5s areas

Basically people in wrong areas. Be it soft play, trampoline Park, playground, ninja warrior... separating out age groups means everyone can play safely and appropriately

Kids trying to walk up the slides, or blocking the slide exit. My days of soft play are over but I'd just tell them firmly to move out the way