The obsession with children being loud in public and disturbing others...

[floweplantpot]

On here, is incredible.

I'm nearly 40 years old and I don't think any child has ever disturbed me while I was out in public. I just don't understand how easily irritated people on here get ?

Do we go to different places or something ?

Does anyone else relate to me or do others also often encounter children that bother them in public ?

Think, being on their iPads / phones watching ' very loud ' videos that have ruined your trip out to lunch, or kids running around places etc.

I've never really seen this or even noticed it.

Same on planes.. I've been sat near babies and they sometimes cried, but nothing unbearable.

On here it's like people absolutely despise kids out and about being loud/ existing and being kids...

The only people that have ever bothered me in public have been drunk adults who were threatening people in a tube carriage / a random man in the supermarket calling me a slut / another random man shouting at me for no reasons once when I was sitting in a parked car.. never kids..

I was once on a flight and the child in front of me put his hands through the sides of his seat and stroked my leg throughout half the duration of flight & I kept batting him away with the flight safety card and he just grabbed it off me and waved it about behind him on our aisle (this will be extremely outing if anyone knows me as I recorded it because we found it uncomfortable but hysterical)
How the parents didn’t realise the child was doing that I have no idea

But other than that, can’t think of any occasions children have been disturbing 🤣

You recorded it? Sorry - have I misunderstood?

It doesn’t happen all the time but it does happen. I had that kid on a plane whose parents slept all night and he bounced his chair and did anything to annoy me for 9 hours.
I think people on phones talking is annoying as kids on tablets.

The worst experience I had is when DD was small and DH and I struggled to get out alone. We went for dinner and some parents basically kept pushing their child towards us so they could eat alone. Everytime I sent them away their mum would send them back over. I had to walk him over and explain I had paid for a babysitter myself and didn’t want to babysit someone else’s kid.

The lack of resilience of people in public nowadays is embarrassing

I filmed it and sent it to my friends because it was one of those you have to see it to believe it things, it was literally just a floating hand. No face. I was also a teenager at the time

I've had many more experiences ruined by badly behaved adults than kids.

I am the same. I love children. I am with children almost constantly. When I am not, I am enjoying the quiet.

Same

About ten or twelve years ago I went out with a friend to a cafe without our children.
We were sitting at a table and there was a family at a table behind us. I was rather surprised to feel small hands on my back stroking me. The child said something to his or her parents who answered something like " oh yes darling".
This continued, so I moved my chair forward, further away from the child. There was a scraping of the chair behind and the stroking continued.
I was really surprised.
I turned around and said " Hello". The parents were eating cake and simpered at me. I turned to said child and said " could you stop doing that please as it's incredibly irritating". There was a sharp intake of breath from the parents and they left pretty quickly.
There were little shops around the cafe and when I walked into one, the family rushed out.
This situation still really puzzles me. Was I some form of entertainment for their child so they could eat in peace? Who would let their child stroke a stranger's back and not request that they stop it? Most peculiar.

Op - 'obsession' is a very minimising and snarky word, just because you haven't suffered something, don't minimise others experiences.

But the OP has not noticed it... so it clearly does not happen to anyone else..

Things only tend to be said often when they're true.

If that poster had said the sky is green, it couldn't go in your 'bank', could it? 🤷‍♂️

Nobody’s ever called me a slut in the supermarket or shouted at me in a parked car, but you don’t see me starting a thread to tell me you shouldn’t be annoyed by it when it happens to you.

How about just accepting that different people have different experiences and are annoyed by different things? I mean, I’m delighted you’ve never been annoyed by a kid with an iPad, but I’ve sat on a plane for two hours while the kid behind me watched an hour of videos of squeaky-voiced cartoon characters singing the same children’s songs over and over again in nasal American accents, and yes, I did find it incredibly fucking annoying. If you don’t, maybe you could swap seats with me next time it happens.

I like a nosey chatty child. The only thing I find annoying, well sad is when parents are ignoring their children, scrolling etc.

When I was younger and had long hair, a woman was really stroppy with me because I told her child to stop playing with it. He was standing on the seat behind me on the bus specifically so he could lean over and mess with my hair and his mother seemed to think that was acceptable behaviour “because he’s only four”. OK, mate, but you’re his mother and you’re NOT only four, so about you be the adult here and tell your sticky fingered snot nosed child to leave random women’s hair alone?

The last flight I took, my 8 year old and I were seated in a row of three with a very smartly dressed, very polite older lady. We exchanged pleasantries and I jokingly told her not to worry as we had plenty of games and books to keep us busy so we wouldn't disturb her during the flight. She laughed and smiled and then she pulled out her ipad and proceeded to watch about 5 episodes of a TV series at full volume right next to us.......

This is what noise cancelling headphones were invented for. 90% of the time I don't mind kids making kid noises, they're an important part of society and it's a bit Victorian to think they should be seen and not heard (or better yet not seen, heard or encountered in daily life at all, it would seem!). But if I'm feeling particularly noise sensitive, or someone nearby is being particularly loud - on go the headphones, goodbye goes the outside world.

Very occasionally but I work in an industry where I deal with secondary age children on their own and they can be buggers when they're unsupervised in groups. It's not often though. Occasionally a loud kid in a restaurant but I shrug it off cos my own are loud. Certainly nothing to upset me.

I’m not usually bothered by noise from other people’s children but I did complain about the child who repeatedly ran past our table in an expensive restaurant (i.e. one which we could only afford on rare occasions) and out of some French doors into the garden, leaving the doors banging in the wind. It was cold, noisy and misery making so I went to speak to the parents who’d “not noticed”. Even after I’d pointed it out they still deigned “not to notice” so the maître d’ found us a nicer table, out of the range of said child. My husband reckoned he’d stick his foot out if the little brat came running past our new table but I think the staff must have had a word with the parents after moving us because things quietened down then.

Also, some people are more sensitive to their environment than others aren’t they? I notice far more than my husband (soon to be ex but that’s irrelevant here) ever did. When he used to sit at his desk clicking his pen onto his iPad or whatever it was, I used to want to stuff my fingers in my ears. On the other hand I could probably have played a trumpet voluntary prior to speaking to him and he’d not have noticed 🤔

After 5 dc I think i just filter out noise from children. I was in a noisy cafe with my friend and she commented on a small child hollering behind us. I hadn't noticed, but the noise of the coffee machine blasting every view minutes really got under my skin. Kids running around would bother me but I haven't really seen a lot of that tbh.

Dogs have annoyed me far more in public places than kids ever have.

Nobody wants to hear young Jayden playing Baby Shark on repeat in Costa, Cassandra, no matter how adorable you think it is.

Living in an affluent area of london and yes the kids I come across are so
loud and have never been told no or shhhhh in their lifetime. In my old neighborhood with more normal folk, kids behaved better.

I have found it v interesting having been working a lot more in cafes and libraries the past six months (during renovation) that it tends, I’m sorry to say, to be often the older generation who have their phones on loud / don’t carry headphones around and think it’s fair enough to listen to videos on their phones, or have loud phonecalls on speakerphone. A lot more younger people using laptops but they tend to use headphones so who cares (unless they seem to think it’s acceptable to be on a zoom in a library or quiet cafe!) As for kids, I do get annoyed by parents playing music or YouTube videos loudly in cafes but you can hardly blame the kids for that. The kids themselves playing are very rarely as noisy as these various tribes of adults!

Even well-behaved children make more noise than most adults. They chat and want to engage with their adults and each other. While no one likes badly-behaved tearaways, the problem for children in general, even the angelic variety, is that there are certain public places where anything but a funereal silence is viewed as offensive. Many commuter rail services, long-distance coaches, First and Business class on planes, cafes patronised by the wfh brigade and certain restaurants, to name but a few. Even a child chatting happily to their adult is an unacceptable infringement of the peace and quiet which those who patronise these places expect. I'm still slightly bemused by being glared at by a man behind his laptop on the neighbouring table for having the audacity to play Connect4 in a busy cafe with my 6 year old! Especially as the game was provided by the cafe 😂.