Children's Spaces With No Children

Have we lost our very minds?

screenshot via TikTok

About two years ago, we booked a trip to Disney World. I joined a handful of social media groups to help me plan, since I hadn’t been to Disney since I was a child. A few weeks ago, mid-insomnia-scroll of one of these groups, a popular thread popped up. A new adults-only lounge has launched at one of the parks and posters were comparing notes about the experience. I was shocked to see that the comments displayed a vitriolic hatred of… children at Disney World. Here are a few gems (it’s mostly like that throughout, with the mods removing the really nasty “crotch goblin” ones before I could return to screenshot):

I am weary of being gentle about this, so I won’t be. Have we lost our very minds? Can we get the tiniest grip? Are we really at the point where a not-insignificant contingent of the folks who are regularly attending a park themed around children’s media, media that they likely first encountered when they were themselves children, resent the presence of kids? The audacity that someone would go to Disney World— of all places!— and feel not neutral about the presence of younger humans but actively irritated is wild. I imagine them, seething in line to see an adult dressed up as Snow White, frustrated that a toddler is hugging her for too long and they won’t make their Lightning Lane to Small World! The entitlement of demanding that children relinquish spaces celebrating childhood so that adults can indulge in nostalgia for their own childhoods according to their very specific and subjective preferences is real loser energy. I am tired of it, and you should be, too.

Let me rewind: I don’t know when this happened, or even if it’s always been this way, but many people now consider dislike of children as a valid opinion. Folks say “I don’t like kids,” as casually as they’d say they prefer Pepsi to Coke. When people say things like “kids are okay, but I just don’t want them around me,” we don’t generally question that. I think we should. When we treat disliking an entire, diverse group of humans for something they can’t change as reasonable, we enter dangerous territory. Children aren’t pets or soda brands or sports teams. They’re billions of people, as fully human as the rest of us. Their right to participate and engage with the community isn’t up for discussion or debate. Saying you don’t want to see children shouldn’t be a cheeky refrain. It should be a record scratch.

I don’t want to hear, “but I’m bad with kids!” Not being skilled with children is a fixable deficit. Not everyone needs to become a kindergarten teacher or enjoy hours of pretend play, but if simply sitting a few tables away from a family is so distressing to you, it’s worth asking what might increase your tolerance. I am frankly done apologizing for the fact that my children are simply… existing in the world at an age younger than eighteen. I personally “don’t like” Pepsi, but it wouldn’t occur to me to insist restaurants stop serving it. I deal with it because encountering things that I don’t necessarily want for myself is part of leaving the house. My minute preferences should not come at the expense of others living their lives.

You might be saying, what’s the real harm? The rising tide of anti-child sentiment is not just grumbling. The attention-seeking adults who farm engagement on social media with takes about how children shouldn’t be permitted on public transit, in grocery stores, in libraries, or basically anywhere except hidden away and cared-for by women (who apparently never need to go any of these places either?) aren’t outliers. Offline, spaces where children are unconditionally welcome are shrinking due to the disproportionate spending power of adults who “prefer” not to see them. The fact that we are now questioning if they belong in traditionally children’s spaces is a real bellwether of the direction we are headed.

As a parent of two young children, I have seen this trend in the wild. Even in places where I would generally expect to see a lot of kids, there are often adults who, I’ll put this gently, don’t know how to share. Judging by the stares we get when entering a restaurant, you’d think we had a mountain lion in tow instead of two toddlers. I’ve given up on attending parades because there is always a (usually more than tipsy) gaggle of adults shoving and pushing to the front so my kids can’t easily see. The zoo sells beer now! To big groups of adults who camp out in front of the animal enclosures. The Natural History Museum now advertises an adults-only after-hours party for those who want to see dinosaur skeletons without a curious kindergartner killing their vibe. We want childlike wonder without children I think because, I’ll be perfectly frank, some of these folks still want to be society’s baby themselves. The impulse to make children’s spaces more adult-friendly is borne of this entitlement. We want a bar/lounge at the Disney World, but never the reverse. The pitchforks come out when we suggest there should be a playground anywhere at all. We ruthlessly police the boundaries of where children do and do not belong as though their inclusion is a four-alarm fire and not just a normal thing for places where humans gather.

This matters because children are themselves a vulnerable group, with few individual rights, and little autonomy. Isolating children is dangerous, particularly for children who lack resources and support at home. Even in less dire circumstances, kids learn about how to be a person by participating in these same spaces where they are increasingly unwelcome. When we treat dislike for vulnerable humans as a personality quirk, a temperament issue, or worse, insist it’s about accessibility, we set the stage for a society that abdicates its duty to care for the next generation. When we insist this is about “accessibility,” we neatly elide the truth that many of the children who are considered most disruptive in public are neurodivergent themselves. Accessibility never means banning vulnerable groups from public life.

Caregivers, who are often women, also need and deserve to participate in public. Young mothers are vulnerable themselves, often for reasons that are part and parcel to motherhood— decreased earning ability, precarious employment, and more. We are victim-blaming when we insist that if you don’t have disposable income for increasingly unaffordable babysitting, a supportive partner, children who can be easily cared for by unfamiliar adults (that is, are not disabled or otherwise medically complex), or nearby family you trust, you ought to sit at home until that changes. This, coupled with natalist and sexist shaming of women who use any childcare at all is a real toxic soup. We can’t just lock everyone away and expect it will improve. “Out of sight, out of mind” is not a strategy that has ever, in human history, produced greater equity for the marginalized.

“But Lauren,” you’re saying, “surely you don’t think kids belong everywhere.” To that I say, I think you’re derailing, but sure. That said, if we are going to exclude children, we should do it on the basis of benefit to the children. I can appreciate why children shouldn’t be at a bar that doesn’t sell food, a dispensary, or on a high-difficulty hiking trail. Before outright banning kids, we should ask ourselves why it’s necessary, and if the answer is simply that they might annoy someone, that just isn’t good enough. It’s far from a foregone conclusion that a child coloring a Water Wow in the corner of a restaurant will ruin your entire night or that every adult will be perfectly well-behaved. Encountering other humans— many of them diverse and different from you— is a part of existing in a non-homogenous society, and it elevates rather than diminishes us. We need to stop treating differences like emergencies and begin to view them as opportunities for growth and empathy. Our presumption should be that children are welcome nearly everywhere, and we should keep the exceptions rare lest we continue to normalize the dehumanizing sentiment that children are a problem to solve and not part of the richness of our community.

Finally, I know there will be some thinking a version of, “I didn’t choose to be a parent and so your choices shouldn’t impede on my enjoyment of my free time!” This fierce individualism sends us down a dark road, my friends. Much like your most narcissistic acquaintance who has been over-therapied into thinking that “good boundaries” mean never showing up for the people they care about or that “emotional labor” is saying “thank you,” we must resist the urge to conflate our preferences with our very well-being. Also, let me hit you with a hard truth: you may not need others now, but ability and caregiver status fluctuate significantly over the course of a lifetime, often in ways we can’t predict or control. At 28, when I had no children and two very able-bodied parents, it was hard to envision how that could change. My petty annoyances in public felt much more urgent. Now, I did choose to become a mother (before my bodily autonomy was stripped from me in many states), but my need for— and dependence on— the collective also increased in ways I couldn’t possibly have anticipated.

Toward the end of my dad’s life, he used a wheelchair. I remember going places with my then one- and three-year-old, my disabled dad, my mom, and my husband. It was incredibly difficult to find spaces that catered to his needs as well as theirs and harder still to find other adults with the patience we required. I remember the frustrated glares of strangers leaning on the car horn, waiting for our parking space. It took a long time to fold his wheelchair and our stroller into the trunk. I remember folks sighing dramatically as I asked if they could hit the power button on the automatic door as I carried an infant, a three-year-old clutching my leg, my husband pushing dad’s chair, mom weighed down with a diaper bag and an oxygen concentrator. I could feel the unspoken annoyance, the flash of if this is so hard for them, why can’t they just stay home. I didn’t, and still don’t, believe we should be hidden away because he was dying and they were just recently alive. I believe my father, in the twilight of his life, should have been able to enjoy the simple pleasure of a meal with his grandchildren, who sadly will not grow up with him. This doesn’t change even if someone had to wait a little longer for parking or my baby cried. There is real ugliness in believing otherwise, and I refuse to call it a simple difference of opinion. We don’t always have time to do things when the children get older, when the baby is more settled, when the bloodwork improves, or when the toddler is more regulated. In our messy, non-linear, unpredictable humanity, we only have now for sure.

I promised myself that if I ever got to the other side of it, if it ever got easier, I would view small moments of personal inconvenience in service of our shared humanity and inclusion as a sacrifice I am grateful to make. I hold doors, smile reassuringly at a horrified and panicked mom whose toddler just let out a piercing cry, and gently offer an extra set of hands to an elderly husband who is struggling to transfer his wife to a wheelchair while balancing her purse. I think maybe you can do it, too— and also that you should. Someday you may need someone to be that person for you, and if you do, I hope I’m there to hold your backpack.

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