No children in pub after 5pm

[SweetSouls]

My local banned children after 7pm a few years ago.

This seemed unnecessary to me, but I suppose that's after 'bed time' so I could sort of see the logic. Adult time etc.

On Saturday I went to stop there for a drink in the afternoon, and they have now banned children after 5pm.

This seems very odd to me given it's an area that people move to with their families. It's not some town centre boozer, it's surrounded by housing.

Is this just not terrible business? I do not get it at all.

It was almost empty, incidentally, at 5.15 on a Saturday afternoon.

It sounds to me like the answer is for pubs/bars/restaurants to start being more transparent about the type of establishment they are and who can be there, and when.

i don’t think there’s ever a good reason for children to be in a bar, which is dark with loud music. We need spaces for adults who want a proper night out.

Apart from the annoyance to the customers, I’m fairly sure none of the staff are qualified to be herding children around drunk people and it’s not their job. But in pubs and restaurants the parents should be solely responsible for anything that happens as a result of their kids running wild, whether that’s damage, spilt drinks, ruined clothes injuries. Then they might start taking it seriously.

Ive been in many situations where children could be taken out of the pub without their parents knowing, and we can’t expect security staff to monitor who’s with which family! I can’t believe some parents risk this happening.

i don’t think there’s ever a good reason for children to be in a bar, which is dark with loud music. We need spaces for adults who want a proper night out.

That is for the individual establishment to decide. Adults who want a proper night out aren't inherently entitled to that, any more than parents who want a pub to take their kids to are. The sector has no obligation to cater for either.

Same in France on the whole, and if children do misbehave I've noticed there's every chance that others apart from the parents won't hesitate to correct them on the basis that "it takes a village" and all that
Try that in the UK and see how it goes...

Exactly. I often wonder how many of the 'It takes a village' brigade would be happy to extend the analogy to the village correcting their child. Not many, I'd wager.

We have new-ish neighbours in our street who are really struggling with the fact that people here will tell off a child that’s on someone’s garden/messing around too close to the cars/playing too close to the road junction.

They absolutely hate it. I love it - I think it makes all the children much safer. I think people are either one or the other with other people correcting your child - some people just absolutely hate it.

They (the parents) will quite happily get involved in petty squabbles between the children though 🙄

There's a certain type of parent who confuses a venue being open to children and family friendly with it being an acceptable play for children to run riot and misbehave.

So true. A couple of notable examples spring to mind: someone who thought other people in a restaurant should watch the kids so the parents could get a break ('Whatever happened to it takes a village?') and someone who thought kids should be allowed to run around in McDonald's because 'it's a children's restaurant.'

A PP on this thread said there is an expectation to include children in everything now. Ive just seen an example on another thread where the OP is being asked if shes taking her 11 year old DSD...........on her honeymoon. And getting the "poor DSD" comments when she says no.

I remember a poster on here once saying that she expected other patrons to keep an eye on her toddler when she was out and to redirect him to her with a smile and a kind word if he wandered off. When questioned about why she’d expect this, she simply said it was what women (of course) would naturally do for a child, and couldn’t understand that this might impact upon everyone else’s dining experience.

I think about her sometimes and the chaos she’s probably leaving in her wake.

This type of expectation of women gets my goat no end. I like children but I don't go out to make funny faces at strangers' kids while they ignore them. Funnily enough I've never heard anyone suggest their kid 'tells the nice man all about Peppa Pig' while they sit with their head in their phone not bothering to parent.

I remember a thread on here about a lady in a cafe being asked to watch someone's toddler when mum wanted to visit the loo.
A lot of people saying it would have done no harm to oblige.

I was in a Costa, and a man left his small child (complete with the obligatory tablet on loud) to go shopping. There were about 4 other customers in the whole place. Me and DP were the closest. He was gone about 20 minutes. My DP complained to the staff that it was wrong (and dangerous). They just shrugged it off.

even if the establishment can decide, doesn’t mean it isn’t wrong. If they don’t currently have to install safeguarding measures - they should. I’m not going to be liable or adjust my night out to accommodate someone else’s kids if the environment is inappropriate for them. no one should be forced to interact with children when they’re drunk. This is so many levels of wrong.

saying that children should be in a bar is insane. So we’ll all down some shots and go staggering around a soft play area shall we? No, because that would be dangerous and unfair because that’s their space.

@JenniferBooth yes exactly, when you have children especially when young parents need to realise you can’t keep living the life as before kids I.e going to places like pubs, fine dining , wine tours etc!
I see many “influencer parent” still take there babies / toddlers to restaurants and places I really wouldn’t like to take my child, as it’s fun for the adult but not the kids.
i guess everyone wants what everyone else has but no one wants to respect others , but that’s my view, some pple will disagree haha

@Eejitmum101 I agree. But to be fair I was lucky and had plenty of babysitting offers.
I really hate seeing a child sitting in a pub hopefully it will bece socially unacceptable in the next decade.

@JenniferBooth yes exactly, when you have children especially when young parents need to realise you can’t keep living the life as before kids I.e going to places like pubs, fine dining , wine tours etc!

A lot of parents do think they should be able to do exactly the same things as before though, hence all the moaning about the UK not being child friendly and hating children.

None of this matters though, ultimately. You're allowed an opinion, of course. But if there are no venues in the vicinity that happen to share it and they all decide they prefer other custom, you're shit out of luck. This would also be true of a parent who wanted a family friendly space and found the sector in their area had no interest in meeting their perceived needs.

What do we think the overlap is between the people saying "you chose to have kids, that comes with an obligation to only ever go to places aimed at children and not impose them on grownups" and the people saying "the trouble with Gen Z/Alpha is that they think the world revolves around them and they've never been made to do anything they might not
like"?

I'm not advocating full-on seventies parenting, and I've done my fair share of soft play centres, but I do believe that expecting children to fit in with what the adults in the family want/need to do, within reason, is not bad parenting, and can in fact be beneficial.

Also, a lot of the "no children in pubs ever" posters seem to be thinking of screaming toddlers, and have forgotten that fifteen year olds are also children.

1878 or 1978/88?!

Yes, but you forget that a lot of parents, when they take out DC to pubs, whether this is on weekends for lunch or in the evenings, some of them don't allow their DC to behave well and/or expect other people to tolerate them, because, you know, they have children.

One time recently I was in a pub for a Sunday lunch date, family of 8 in total next to us, included a 4/5 year old, 2-3 year old and a baby and a 8-9 year old and 2 sets of parents. We were sat blocked in fairly close together with not much of a gap between tables, we couldn't move table though requested to, pub was rammed anyway. Baby starts crying, mother attempts to soothe/feed it, after 5 mins still full on crying, she didn't take it outside (nice weather too, no rain), baby continues to cry and scream for the next 10 mins. 2-3 year old starts fighting and trying to play with the older child who's playing on an ipad which has the sound fully turned up, no ear defenders on. Parents weren't engaging with these children apart from to say, "stop that, be quiet" and then returning to their meals, drinks. Then the 2-3 year old throws a bread roll (not at us luckily!) which lands near another older couple's table. The father of the child says 'Oops, say sorry Tarquin (made up name!)' Tarquin, "silence". The meal carried on like that for the remainder of their time there though admittedly there was laughter and fun noises from the table, albeit quite loud. They were both upper class families in a pub in an upper class village in SE London. When they finally left, a bit earlier than I expected to be honest, we breathed a sigh of relief, but our time was up anyway from our meal.

I actually know one of the bar staff in there (it's a sort of regular of mine) and mentioned this briefly to him when he saw me and asked how my meal had gone. He sighed and said 'we can't do anything about it, but it frustrates us and Sunday lunches are our bread and butter, we realise the impact on other customers though, sorry your meal was spoilt by their behaviour'. He also mentioned that the mess some of them leave behind is appalling, vomit sometimes, not cleared up, dirty nappies left there, food smeared on tables, chairs which includes soft furnishings of chairs.

This is in a pub in a naice area, on a weekend, god knows what it's like elsewhere!

There are lots of headlines about pubs going out of business and this is why. First they kicked the smokers out and now kids. Pubs used to be a fun place but now it’s like going to a library

It won't.

If having kids in was helping pubs they’d be increasing their kids menu and having more child friendly stuff.

The fact that more and more are banning or cutting down children in suggests they feel kids are costing them money

And you can hardly blame pubs for the smoking ban

My local pubs don't have security staff

Hmm that’s a bit unfair
i can see why you want them banned, at a certain time yes, acceptable, like at peak times!
But a total outright ban, I can’t see that happening as they’d lose a lot of business!
look I take my baby to the pub to watch footy on a Sunday but we would go early like 2pm, where our local is pretty empty!
total bans aren’t gonna work unless it’s a high end restaurant which I can see acceptable

What do we think the overlap is between the people saying "you chose to have kids, that comes with an obligation to only ever go to places aimed at children and not impose them on grownups" and the people saying "the trouble with Gen Z/Alpha is that they think the world revolves around them and they've never been made to do anything they might not like"?

Well, in my experience parents are taking their kids to places not aimed at children and then letting them do as they like.

It’d be different if they were taking them out and actually parenting them, but they’re not, so.

Pubs used to be a fun place but now it’s like going to a library

Going to a library is like going to soft play these days. I miss going to the library so much!

In my local pub, families come in to have meals, no mooching, just dining