Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletterStay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter <\/p>\n
There\u2019s an episode of Sex and the City\u00a0\u2013 the OG, not any of the films or reboots \u2013 that really struck a chord with me back in my twenties. The girls are out for lunch, and the topic of conversation turns to kids.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am so sick of these people with their children,\u201d says Samantha, scathingly. \u201cI\u2019m telling you, they\u2019re everywhere. Sitting next to me in first class, eating at the next table at Jean-Georges. This place is for double cappuccinos, not double strollers.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDamn straight \u2013 you tell \u2019em, sister!\u201d I thought, though thankfully didn\u2019t say it aloud (I could never have pulled off \u201csister\u201d, even at the age of 23).<\/p>\n
At the time, no one I knew had children. They were like alien creatures: tiny, strange, loud, erratic. I rarely had to share any kind of space with them \u2013 while I was getting pissed at shiny wine bars, they were, presumably, singing about visually impaired mice at soft play \u2013 but I instinctively felt that Samantha must be right. People simply shouldn\u2019t be going to nice places with their offspring to ruin it for the rest of us. Total vibe killer.<\/p>\n
Apparently, 23-year-old me wasn\u2019t the only one adhering to the questionable belief that children should be neither seen nor heard in modern society. The endless bitter discourse has kicked off once more after a man\u2019s post, featuring a picture of him next to a sign outside a pub, went viral on social media. \u201cDog-friendly \/ child-free\u201d reads the chalkboard; \u201cFound my new local,\u201d reads his caption.<\/p>\n
What was likely a flippant post quickly attracted the ire of parents the internet over, while singles and child-free adults stood behind their new, chosen champion. Shots were fired. Battle lines were drawn. \u201cScreaming kids are the bane of my life,\u201d wrote one staunch defender of the original tweet. \u201cI went to a WINE TASTING recently and someone brought their toddler who was allowed to run around shouting, banging things, causing general disruption. Kid-free areas should exist.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those with children, unsurprisingly, tended not to agree with this sentiment. \u201cI don\u2019t say this often but I genuinely hope they go out of business,\u201d commented one; \u201cImagine celebrating the exclusion of any other demographic from a public space,\u201d replied another.<\/p>\n
This debate is not new. Some situation arises every few months that brings it wailing and raging to the fore, capable of prompting even the most sensible of grown-ups to metaphorically stamp their feet, pound their fists on the floor and throw the kinds of tantrums that the child-free contingent claim to be so against. If it\u2019s not someone extolling the virtues of adult-only zones on flights that\u2019s causing controversy online, it\u2019s someone complaining about a kid-free wedding, or refusing to share the price of a friend\u2019s babysitter. The reason I brought up the SATC\u00a0scene is that it first aired in 2003; which means we were having this exact same vitriolic debate more than 20 years ago. Surely we\u2019re all exhausted by now?<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll hold my hands up and say it \u2013 I don\u2019t really like children all that much. I don\u2019t have my own, and much as I love my nieces, most rugrats I could take or leave (and would most likely leave, to be brutally honest). I\u2019m the woman at the christening who, when proffered the blessed child, backs away in favour of finding the beige buffet. The person who has to frantically scrawl the WhatsApp chat for a mention of my friend\u2019s new baby before we meet up, because I\u2019ve forgotten their name. I often see them as a mild annoyance \u2013 a nuisance element that means the person I\u2019m having lunch with can only keep half an ear on the constantly interrupted conversation, to ensure their kid doesn\u2019t ingest rocks, or stick a pencil up their nose, or whack the waitress on her shins with a spoon.<\/p>\n
Samantha from \u2018Sex and the City\u2019 was defeated by pesto when she tried to enforce child-free spaces (HBO)And yet, for all that, I am not so completely unhinged as to presume that my right to a peaceful and zen-like public space trumps the right of children \u2013 and, by association, their care-givers \u2013 to coexist in the world. Who am I, Cruella de Vil? Part of being a grown-up and not a child is having the maturity to realise that, hey, the world doesn\u2019t actually revolve around you. And another classic: you can\u2019t always have what you want. It\u2019s pure narcissism to expect otherwise. Adulthood is all about accepting the thousands of micro-compromises that must be made on a daily basis, including learning to rub along with people that you don\u2019t much care for. I don\u2019t like the intimidating rowdiness of sports fans en masse, for example \u2013 but does that mean that men in football shirts should be banned from the local pub on match day?<\/p>\n
Part of being a grown-up and not a child is having the maturity to realise that, hey, the world doesn\u2019t actually revolve around you<\/p>\n
And in fact, that\u2019s the intrinsic beauty of the British pub. It\u2019s one of the few places left in modern life where you\u2019ll find every demographic of society sharing the same space: families, friends, couples, lone alcoholics propping up the bar; young, old, and everything in between. I truly believe that being in the presence of people unlike ourselves \u2013 being forced to, for example, practice patience and tolerance while a parent chases their screaming toddler round a beer garden \u2013 makes us better, more compassionate people. Conversely, othering and segregating one section of society purely for childless people\u2019s benefit makes us smaller, narrower people.<\/p>\n
Back to that SATC\u00a0episode. Samantha later admonishes a mother and her son at a restaurant, suggesting that \u201cPerhaps you could take him somewhere more appropriate for a Happy Meal, so that I could have a happier one.\u201d His measured response is to chuck a handful of pasta and pesto on her white suit. I can\u2019t say I blame him. As humans, we have to learn to share the one world we have; otherwise, we all deserve to be pesto-ed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Stay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletterStay ahead of the trend in fashion and beyond with our free weekly Lifestyle Edit newsletter There\u2019s an episode of Sex and the City\u00a0\u2013 the OG, not any of the films or reboots \u2013 that really struck a chord with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3127,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n