My experience as a parent tells me that we definitely don’t have a “child-worshipping culture”. A lot of the general public would like it if we raised our kids with a Victorian “seen but not heard” approach. Unless you’ve experienced a restaurant visit, trip to the shops, bus journey, flight, or basically any public outing, with a child who is chatty or a bit lively (no, I’m not using these as euphemisms for “naughty”) and been on the receiving end of the tuts, sighs, dirty looks and whispering then I can well imagine that you don’t see it. I do not allow my children to run amok and misbehave (not to say that they don’t, like all children, have occasional bad days where I have no choice but to still do the supermarket shop), but I won’t demand silence from them every time we leave the house (or even in our own home as this writer would like) and I won’t apologise for perfectly normal behaviour.
A portion of the people in society are children. If a person finds the ordinary behaviour of children, with associated noise and movement at normal levels, to be distressing then my suggestion would be that they choose a detached house in a remote location and select adult-only venues for socialising.
Did this writer not realise that living in a semi or terrace means you will hear noise from next door? Did he not realise that a family might live there at some point?