DD is 9 and we have booked several activities recently, both free library ones and paid for activities. Locally, activities are pretty much grouped into 0-5, 5-8 and 8-11. We have booked onto to the 8-11 year old sessions.
Every single activity we have booked onto has been overrun with under fives. Very rarely are they the siblings of older children attending. They are almost all groups of mums meeting up at the activities with their toddlers. All of the activities are fully booked. Most of the activities are for children to attend on their own while parents stay in the vicinity but because the toddlers are so little their parents understandably stay with them, mostly helping them to complete activities they are too young for and trying to keep them safe. Last week, one mum asked the librarian to put the scissors away as the little ones kept grabbing at them. At a theatre event, a toddler kept shouting out throughout the show, and at an outdoor activity DD didn’t want to go on her own (which the activity was meant for) as she would have been the only child there without a parent as it wasn’t safe for little ones to do on their own. Today, the library turned the event (journaling) for older children into a bounce and rhyme as every other child there was under five. We just left in the end as she didn’t want to sit on the carpet listening to a picture book!
AIBU to expect the activities to remain geared at the age group it’s aimed at, even though most of the audience is much younger?
I spoke to the librarian today and she said they are probably going to stop running the activities for older kids now as very few older children attend. I said that they probably couldn’t attend as all of the places had been booked by parents of younger children. All of the under fives bounce and rhyme activities have continued.