Children should be seen and not heard

[ItsUpToYou]

Does anyone else think we’re slowly (very slowly) heading back to this attitude towards children? From the families who plonk iPads in front of their kids at every unstructured moment to keep them quiet, to the constant complaints on MN about children (who aren’t plonked on their iPads) playing too loudly in their gardens or wherever else, it seems like the overall consensus is that children either need to be perfectly placid at all times or completely silent.

Everything is so structured and regimented for children nowadays in a way that it wasn’t when I was growing up in the 90s. The way DM described her childhood in the 60s and 70s sounds ever freer than mine was.

AIBU to feel a bit sorry for the current generation of children (and feel super pressured as a parent to make sure my children appear “perfectly placid” at all times for fear of judgement!)

If children are running around a resturant and the staff drop food on them or a hot drink who will take the blame, I presume not the parents?

Why can kids not be sat at a table?

Those sort of parents would be the first to complain and no doubt hop onto social media with sad faces.

I agree with a PP about some teenagers, some are vile now and they know full well they can get away with most things as no one will do anything about it; no doubt a lot started when they were young and a lack of parenting.

They still need to learn to behave in situations where they might be a bit bored. It won’t do them any harm. They can do to the park and run around to let off steam before or after. But in the restaurant they need to sit down and behave in a reasonably civilised way.

That was my childhood too to be fair and I was born 1975. We fitted in and knew our place within the family hierarchy.
However, the freedom and expectation to entertain ourselves was very healthy I believe- certainly for my sisters and I.

It’s 50/50. The votes and also my opinion. No, I don’t think children should be kept quiet with an iPad or similar and yes, they do need to be able to play and run around, making lots of noise. But they should also learn to keep their voices down when they’re in a restaurant or anywhere where they might disturb other people. It’s a question of respect and good manners, qualities that seem to have vanished nowadays. I know I sound like an old fart but it’s a fact.

YABVU.

It always seems to be the rude inconsiderate parents who think that the only two options are constant Ipad use or let them make as much noise as they like. Or keep them locked up 24/7 or let them shriek constantly in the garde. No, reasonable people allow their children to play and behave in an age appropriate way and have fun without unnecessarily disturbing others. It doesn’t have to be one extreme or the other and I have absolutely no idea why you think it does.

So yes your children can play in the garden and make noise but unless they have SN where they cannot help it they really do not need to scream. And I do mean literal screaming.

As for how do you stop them? If anything so basic has to be explained to you that’s telling in itself but you tell them to stop and if persist you bring them in and have a talk. And if they continue then they stay in. Repeat for as long as necessary.

I was no latchkey kid so my family would have hauled me in if I’d dared to be inconsiderate to the neighbours(And they didn’t want to hear it either) but they also didn’t expect me to play in complete silence. And they would have had no problem with a neighbour telling me off if it was justified but now, no heaven forbid that you teach children to show some consideration for others around them even though it will benefit them in the long term.

I do agree that kids need to learn that there are some places where you sit still & behave because it’s an adult space. But I think the problem is we’ve lost alot of the spaces - and tolerance for - where kids can reign free - of both adult expectations & also adult supervision. Where my generation would maybe have a kickabout, it’s now organised sports. Soft plays etc can be brilliant, obviously, but they are created for kids by adults - with rules & boundaries set by adults (& are expensive so exclude lots of families). It’s the loss of playing out, roaming the streets - sometimes noisily, going to the park / the corner shop etc without adult supervision etc that I think is a shame.

It’s really noticeable compared with other cultures. We had two weeks in another country and waiters would chat with the kids, people would give them food or play a little game. It was just constant enthusiasm toward them. We came back to England and realised how depressing it is as parents. Definitely the main thing you have to do as a British parent is ensure your child doesn’t interact or annoy anyone else.

Kids still play out here together(when old enough to do so.) It hasn’t been entirely lost.

Good parenting is repetitive, tedious, and boring hard work. Consistently correcting your kids, so that over time they learn how to be appropriate in a variety of situations takes time, and patience.

Kids who are in school all day, lose the daily connection to their parents and their boundaries, so those boundaries become harder to enforce, and less recognized by the child, because they're further blurred by the often contradictory rules and culture of school.

Parents become less practiced at parenting, because the kids are absent, and being parented elsewhere. Parents who rely heavily on grandparents throw another set of boundaries into the mix, which invariably differ again from what is expected by the parents.

The kids grow up with a variety of rules and behavioural expectations that differ according to who they are with, and often don't know which rules apply. This is often coupled with parents, grandparents and teachers, who are inconsistent with enforcing their varied boundaries, and the kid finds themselves utterly confused, being told off apparently randomly. Why would the kid even bother listening? It's completely unreasonable to expect kids to "behave", if "behave" changes all the time, and the consequences for not behaving change all the time.

I think there was the same guilt around TV. People talked about it lots and there were articles along the lines of 'Is TV actually good for your children' - in the vein of controversial headline. (The answer being in moderation, watching the right stuff and maybe talking to them about it.) People absolutely talked about using it as a babysitter. I had friends who were allowed an hour day.

Have you been on the dog posts on MN by any chance? The posters on them are clearly descended from the Child Catcher!

Children do have to learn to be bored though. Not everywhere is going to thrill them and learning to sit patiently at boring events is a life skill for both children and adults. So I see nothing wrong with taking them to restaurants.

However I do think that you do have to be considerate of their needs at the same time so take them but if you have a restless child who would struggle then keep it short. Don’t go to that restaurant where they take an hour to serve you, no matter how much you like it, go to one where they are quicker to bring out food, have 2 courses instead of 3, interact with your child and accept that you’re going to have to keep more leisurely meals until they are older.

I can't stand kids being given tablets in restaurants. But also there seems to be this mad notion that telling your kids off (properly! Raised voices and consequences) is massively traumatic and that you cannot ever do anything that results a child crying, being upset, or feeling ashamed of themselves. Shame in particular is a funny one. Its an essential part of human societal structure, that shame prevents us doing a lot of bad things, but now its considered (eyeroll) "abusive" to do something to shame a child who has done something deliberately bad.

The result is lots of children seem to have a complete lack of obedience, they demand explanations for every instruction etc. I can't be doing with it! You don't have to explain everything to kids, the answer can be "because I am in charge and I said so". They are children. You know best, not them. They need to know you are empowered to make decisions.

Children do have to learn to be bored though. Not everywhere is going to thrill them and learning to sit patiently at boring events is a life skill for both children and adults. So I see nothing wrong with taking them to restaurants.
However I do think that you do have to be considerate of their needs at the same time so take them but if you have a restless child who would struggle then keep it short. Don’t go to that restaurant where they take an hour to serve you, no matter how much you like it, go to one where they are quicker to bring out food, have 2 courses instead of 3, interact with your child and accept that you’re going to have to keep more leisurely meals until they are older.

This. And children need to learn to make the effort to behave for short periods, to control that urge to run around etc. They need to learn to resist that for a little bit and accept that they can't follow blindly every impulse their undeveloped brain serves them.

When I abroad what I notice is that the local kids know how to behave when out and about. They’ve learnt it from early on and the parents actually discipline them in an effective way when they do play up. I like to interact with well behaved kids but something has gone wrong here in the last few years. U.K. Kids often seem as if they don’t know how to behave in public and therefore people get annoyed with them.

maybe it’s something to do with our more insular less outdoorsy life style. But I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as it is now even when mine weee young.

In Victorian times children were controlled, today they are appeased.

I think you’ll find all Mumsnet kids are like yours.

it’s them others.

Quite the opposite. I think we’re more child-centric than ever.

I see the world revolving more around children now than when I was young (in the 1960s) or when my children were small (in the 1990s). I was brought up to be quiet and not be a 'nuisance' - my mother's biggest complaint. My children were brought up fairly feral but to have a good respect for authority and to be aware of others around them. The next generation down seems to be growing up to believe that only they are important, and their wants are paramount.

I'm sure there must be a happy medium, a nice central ground where children are allowed freedom but still keep a degree of respect for teachers and police, etc. We've got kids coming into the supermarket where I work and stealing stuff as a game. And we're not allowed to do anything, other than ban them from coming in (which they take no notice of). I would have been TERRIFIED of my mother or the police being involved if I'd done this, and my kids were well aware that stealing or anti social behaviour would be come down on like a tonne of bricks (and sufficiently wary of what might subsequently happen to not do it).

I feel society in general has become more intolerant and angry.
More screen time for both adults and children. Parents staring at phones ignoring children. Increasing access to violence online for some children.

Disconnected society.

Definitely!

We used to watch tv after school (Biker Grove, Grange Hill, MTV, T4 on a Sunday morning, cartoons when we were younger, then the evening programmes aswell - gladiators, noel’s house party, game shows etc. I think alot of 80’s/90’s kids did the same. That was our downtime before/after playing out or going out with our parents. It was screen time, we just didn’t call it that and our parents had zero guilt put on them.

These days, my children barely watch tv (movies only) and would choose to play on tech for their downtime. So that might be a play on their games console before a whole day out at a country park or a 10km walk or a day at the beach. My main point was that most kids these days do have a really good balance of activities in a week and when we see them with tech (for example in a restaurant with an ipad), we have no clue what they have been upto for the rest of the day or week.

I swear our neighbours live in their garden through the summer months. Their kids shriek all day long when not at school, on weekends and bank holiday they have extended family or host hordes of other children, BBQs round the clock. It's not better in the winter months, we hear the shrieking and crazy noise through the walls too. Fun times for them, less for us, their kids are loud😭

I've noticed a general unwilling-ness to socialise children into more typically 'adult' settings. People seemingly don't want to spend time with their children they want the time to themselves.

For example when I was a child I would go to ceidlihs that were after bed time 'shock horror' and a big gang of us kids would hang out and play fairly unsupervised, also joined in the dancing. And the youngest kids would have been about 3 the oldest about 7. Get home at midnight. Everyone had a great time. Same thing at adult house parties.

Now I've been taking my son to a jam session that starts at 6:30 and finishes at 10pm in a local venue, free entrance, not necessary to be quiet it's not a performance. A couple of parents have joined but most look shocked at the suggestion. There are lots of kids from babies through early primary age present but they're all from 1st generation immigrant familes, Spanish or Chinese mostly.

There seems to be something wrong with my generation of British parents where we just want time to ourselves and the kids neatly boxed away. Only take the kids to child centred activities in the day and get them to bed early. I used to feel like that too I suppose as it seems to be the culturally done thing now. But looking around the families who aren't doing that are generally having much more fun and the children are getting socialised much better.

Perhaps it's because there are fewer people my age having children? I have lots of friends who haven't had children for whatever reason so half my generation is still living a life that is similar to a recent graduate in their mid-twenties. It seems more frowned upon to bring your children places because not everyone has them and is empathetic to the young child stage?