Even as big cities such as Toronto and Vancouver have fewer young families living in them, the discourse about how children are inescapable continues to grow.Catherine Yeulet/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
With snowsuit season firmly behind us and schools out for summer, children are everywhere you look. Day-camp kids are getting on Toronto buses in their matching T-shirts, standing where you might have wanted to. Toddlers are having meltdowns because the ice cream shop doesn’t have sprinkles, and are holding up the line for you, someone who is much more reasonable about ice cream toppings, possibly because you’re no longer two years old. Parks are overrun with outdoor birthday parties, to the point you’d think children were mostly born in warmer months, like farm animals.
Because of scenes such as these, in Canada and beyond, there’s this growing NIMBY-esque demand for a sealed-off, soundproofed world for children and their minders. Daycares exist, but somewhere else, far away. Children are absent not only from bars and nightclubs, but coffee shops and supermarkets, parks and public transit. It’s a wonderful, child-free utopia.
But because such places do not exist, if you are the parent of young children and you dare bring them places, you encounter people like the lady in our west-end Toronto neighbourhood who muttered, when we passed, “Share the sidewalk!” I will admit that kids their (very young) ages walk more zigzag than your typical adult, but we were doing our best. We could have popped the younger one in a stroller, had we brought one, but this would have opened us up to complaints – and oh, they’re out there – about those darn strollers taking up the whole sidewalk.
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As the journalist Kara Kennedy wrote on Substack, “We need to make it so you aren’t met with eye rolls as soon as you walk into a restaurant with your kid.” Ms. Kennedy suggests this needs fixing as a way of raising the birth rate. I’m neither pro- nor anti-natalist, just of the opinion that children are people.
Something strange happens where, just as big cities – including Toronto and Vancouver – are hemorrhaging young families, the discourse becomes about how the little brats are inescapable. If there are few preschoolers around, how have they come to dominate the lives of the urbanites who aren’t frantically chasing them on their scooters? Why the conniptions whenever a stroller is on a bus?
This seeming paradox is resolved when you consider that when there aren’t kids everywhere, adults grow unaccustomed to their presence. More spaces become de facto adults-only, meaning that when a child enters the café, it becomes a whole thing. The ordinary sounds of children playing are interpreted as noise pollution.
Such was the case for someone who recently wrote in to a New York Times real estate advice column with a gripe about the kids on their lawn. Well, not just theirs, but a communal outdoor space, at the centre of a housing complex in the borough of Queens. The letter-writer works from home, you see, and had been sold an apartment in the building under what they felt were false pretenses: “The garden is a quiet zone. Children must be supervised at all times. Well, it isn’t and they’re not.” The frolicking is ever so bothersome, inspiring the letter-writer to ask, “Can we call the police?”
Not surprisingly, both the columnist, Jill Terreri Ramos, and the comments (there are more than a thousand) focused on the letter-of-the-law question. The garden has a rule, and the rule is being broken. At face value, the options are to find a compromise or enforce the regulation. Ms. Ramos suggested a mediator, and wisely urges against getting cops involved. The commenters were largely on the side of the letter-writer.
But what if even a compromise position is too generous … to the letter-writer? It seems clear to me that the rule itself is cruel and needs to be scrapped. Cruel, and indicative of a widespread attitude toward young children in public spaces.
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Some of the strangeness of the letter is specific to New York, my, let’s say, child-ambivalent hometown. But the complaint inspired sympathetic comments from child-sound-despisers across America and beyond, and not just from big cities. A commenter from Montana even boasted of having a local daycare closed down on account of the noise. While the silliest comment is the one blaming President Donald Trump for “[r]ude, AWOL parents and their cacaphonous [sic] hellions,” more concerning was the sheer volume of anti-child sentiment.
And yet what better place is there for children to play than a courtyard? Alexandra Lange just won a Pulitzer Prize for a Bloomberg series about “the architectural components that allow children and communities to thrive.” Courtyards figure prominently. Ms. Lange calls them “[t]hat one weird trick for making cities more family-friendly,” and with good reason: “[E]ven in areas with public parks, having play space (and play companions) directly outside your door was a huge amenity,” she writes. “That meant no scheduled playdates, no interrupted housework and only minimal supervision required, since kids didn’t have to cross a street to find friends.”
Here is a case where pro-social architecture is already there, no rezoning necessary. The impediments come from the way people are choosing to interact with their environment.
It’s understood that it’s a bad look to hate a swath of humanity based on age, so ire is directed instead at parents, who are faulted for not extracting 40-year-old behaviour from four-year-old offspring. It’s well and good that children are in the yard, but couldn’t they just sit and read a book or something?
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The Times letter-writer threw some shade of the non-garden variety at parents who are physically present but “scrolling on their phones.” (They are either working, as the advice columnist suggested, or texting their partners about what to make for dinner. It is, I promise, no more exciting than that.)
Where the letter-writer saw under-supervision, others flagged the more angst-provoking phenomenon of gentle parenting. A commenter from Vermont spoke for many when claiming, “Over-permissive parents are the bane of our society. Too many seem to think they will crush their child’s spirit if they tell them to hush.”
The observers nostalgic for a time when kids were more obedient aren’t misremembering, but they’re missing what was different. It’s not that gentle parenting took over, but that spanking and its ilk went away, and good riddance. While parents today do say hush, immediate results vary.
Because few children react to 2020s parenting with 1950s-style obedience, what happens instead is a phenomenon known as the kid is handed a tablet. Assuming there are headphones – and reader, I am aware that there are not always headphones – this addresses noise and rowdiness, appeasing tsk-tskers and putting parents at ease.
But throwing screens at one issue creates new ones, ones that also inspire curmudgeonly (but justified) objections. Kids these days never touch grass! That’s why they’re unhealthy and lack social skills, we are told, perhaps not by the same individuals who want children to stay out of gardens, but nevertheless. This is not about individual hypocrisy but rather contradictory demands. One is meant to yearn for an era when kids played stickball unsupervised in the street, but also to alert authorities if children are running around untethered.
There’s a real “no bad dogs, only bad owners” vibe to the letter, but more so the comments, some of which discussed children and dogs interchangeably. One actually wrote, “Children and pets are the responsibility [of] the parents/owners.” Another lamented, “I live in a building where dogs are not allowed off leash in a garden area. When dog parents did not follow those rules all dogs were banned from the area entirely. Sounds like [these] lazy parents should take their kids to the park.” The implication would seem to be that the parents of human children erred in not leashing their offspring.
I had thought of “dog parents” as a term used to denigrate pet owners who treat their pets like babies – especially pet owners who don’t have children. (Think JD Vance sneering at “childless cat ladies.”) But here we have a twist: The people being criticized are the parents of human children who refuse to treat their children like pets. The crime is treating your children like people entitled to take up space.
The quiet-in-the-courtyard brigade acts as though kids’ presence in even seemingly kid-friendly public spaces and in daytime hours is optional. As though an adult with an aversion to kids playing is akin to someone with a pet allergy or phobia that must be accommodated. As though it is misbehaviour or defiance when children play in a park. I mean it can be, if you define parks in this way, which is why the answer is to not do that.
Children are not pets. They are human beings who need socializing into the world of people of all ages. Do we not remember the pandemic lockdowns, and the effect these had on kids? The dogs, on the contrary, had a blast.