LIKE Ally McBeal, I’m haunted by a baby. But this one is real, and it’s everywhere: weddings, church services, dinner parties. It’s not the same baby each time, of course. But it’s ever-present, because so many people these days expect to bring their small children to formal adult occasions.
Superficially, this looks like a charming family-friendly trend. We can pat ourselves on the back for being modishly “continental” now. The sniffy British tradition of Child Hatred is being eroded, and about time, too.
Or is it? How do I feel when I meet a baby at a public event? Not terribly keen, to be honest, if I’ve deliberately left my own behind. I love children — most of the time — but I also treasure a bit of child-free space.
The days of Child Hatred may have gone, but bring on Parent Hatred. Let us embrace our disdain for those who apparently have no sense of the purpose of the occasion, no consideration for how other adults might feel about the infant’s presence. The selfish kind, who expect others to overlook any problems caused by the gate-crashing child in the name of being kindly and liberal.
The kind who allow their babies to yodel throughout solemn wedding vows. The kind who, when I sang in a concert last weekend, brought a toddler and let her stamp up and down beside the choir (I certainly had a shedload of crazy notions when I was a new parent, but it never occurred to me that it might be a wheeze to take a two-year-old to the Mozart Requiem. Why not save time and just lob a hand-grenade into the concert hall?).
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The kind who let their child bawl during a bereaved husband’s oration about his fortysomething wife at her funeral — the howler’s parents stayed put, presumably not wanting to miss the speech themselves. Only after the baby’s protests had drowned about a third of his faltering words did its mother conclude that it was time to bail out.
We seem to be having trouble distinguishing between being child-friendly and being child-centred; between loving our children and allowing our world to revolve around them. Isn’t it part of our job as parents to teach children that they are not the centre of the universe? To teach them to be thoughtful and considerate of other people’s feelings?
Our village church has had a resident toddler, or official wailer, since I can remember. My older two jointly held the title in 1995, when No 1 had a potty crisis and No 2 tested his lungs to the max in the middle of a reading at the carol service. Swift exit from a crowded pew, for what a friend of mine calls the “walk of shame”, to the door was tricky — but it had to be done. We joined the other parents in the porch.
Yet the parents of the latest title-holder have insisted on rearranging the pews to create an enclosed, carpeted play area so they can pop him in there and enjoy the services. The only trouble now is that no one else can. The squawking junior rattles his prison and tries to climb out — if you want to hear God’s “still, small voice of calm”, bring earplugs and sit behind a pillar. In an era of declining religious belief, perhaps our children are our new religion, our only route to immortality.
But some of us still need space from children, our own and others’, in sacred, buggy-free places. We enjoy demarcated child-free time, when we don’t have to watch what we say or do devant les enfants. And we crave the chance to have an, if not intelligent, at least adult conversation — not one about the child’s oh-so-fascinating progress in finger- painting. Because if children are present and bored (as they often are at adult-oriented occasions), it has a knack of bringing the focus of attention back on to itself.
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Instead, our indulged offspring are being led to think that no occasion is out of bounds. When I went to the opera at Covent Garden last year, on a term-time weekday evening, I was staggered by the number of children in the audience. Children who inhabit the adult world from early on have nothing left to discover: precociously accustomed to late nights and opera tickets at £65 a throw, what can they have left to look forward to about growing up?
If you fancy spending “quality time” with your children, why not challenge them to a game of snakes and ladders or Monopoly? Having had some attention from you, they will potter off happily to do some slug-collecting. Finally, put them to bed, not to be allowed to hijack your adult life — assuming, of course, that you still have one.