Over the weekend, my family hosted a concert in our house. It featured an old friend of mine, a kind-of-a-big-deal classical guitarist who lived down the hall from me during our freshman year of college. He now travels the world, has performed for the Queen of England (no big deal), and was passing through Philadelphia.
The concert was a blast. (We did it through an organization called Groupmuse, which is an easy way to see world-class music in intimate settings.) But a few hours before it was set to start, my friend texted me in a panic.
Him: Can you message all the guests to make sure they know it’s kid-friendly?
Me: Umm… The invitation was pretty explicit about it being a concert for kids.
Him: I know, it’s just, most people who go to these concerts are expecting quiet.
Me: …. We called it “Bach for Babies.”
Him: Can you please just message everyone?
Me: OK, fine, I wrote to everyone saying “We’ll have lots of snacks for kids and space for them to play on the rug!”
Him: Phew
He was right, of course. The kids totally changed the atmosphere: there was talking and eating and blocks tumbling and occasional hitting. It was not the same thing as going to a professional performance. Personally, I think it was way more fun, but for a classical music nerd who wanted to follow every note, this was not the right place.
Afterwards, I was chatting with some child-free friends who joined. “I thought it would be kid-friendly, but I hadn’t anticipated exactly how kid-focused it would be,” my friend said, sipping her beer.
My son gleefully swung a toy guitar around and knocked over a tower of Duplos. Part of the fun of hosting something like this is it lets me socialize without having to keep such an eagle-eyed watch over my kid, since it’s his space.
My friend put her hand on my arm to reassure me. “I still thought it was awesome,” she added.
Her husband jumped in. “I guess kid-friendly is, by definition, kid-focused.” The exchange got me thinking. Was he right?
There’s been a flurry of very interesting journalism recently about the divide between parents and non-parents: here by Allison Davis in New York Magazine, here on Anne Helen Peterson’s brilliant Substack, here by Rachel Cohen in Vox.
Every time one of these articles comes out, we talk about it in the group chat — and then, in the separate group chat for moms.
I love being a parent and being in spaces that center children (this essay on the playground being the best “third place” describes my experience of motherhood so well); I also profoundly hate water parks and love being in nice restaurants and art museums where the atmosphere is decidedly non-kid. I have friends who are parents and many who aren’t. Can’t we all just get along?
I remember, a year or so ago, a child-free friend invited me to a wine-tasting event that I couldn’t attend because I didn’t have childcare.
“Why is everything so unfriendly to kids in our society?” I whined to her, annoyed I’d have to skip it.
“That’s funny you say that,” she responded, not sounding particularly amused. “I feel like everything is so focused on kids. I can’t get anyone to hang out with me anywhere other than a playground.”
I felt chastened. But I also felt like both things were simultaneously true. Parents and non-parents have social worlds that feel increasingly separate, and everyone feels like they’re missing out on what the other has.
The origin of this social segregation, I think, is related to the fact that childcare is so damn expensive and precarious. I pay the equivalent of a small European country’s GDP to send my son to daycare while my husband and I are at work; paying even more to a babysitter to go to a wine-tasting on a Tuesday feels frivolous. We don’t have family nearby who are physically able to chase after our wily toddler, so free grandparent childcare is out. Dropping him off with a neighbor or friend feels like a big ask — although it’s worth exploring if it truly is. (I am interested in learning more about babysitting co-ops, and would love to hear from readers who have arrangements like that!)
And perhaps even more of a barrier than the cost of childcare is the fact that I like spending time with my son, and I worry I don’t do enough of it. I’m so busy during the workweek that some days I only see him for a few hours, a fact that makes me profoundly sad.
So, if I could just drag my kid along to the wine-tasting, it would all work out, right?
When I lived and worked in Tanzania and Malawi, most restaurants and events were quite kid-friendly. The culture just seemed different; it was normal to breastfeed in public, to let kids run around a restaurant, to see a crying child as no big deal. I remember a Sunday afternoon concert I would go to most weekends in Lilongwe, where kids and adults alike could — believe it or not — all spend time together. It wasn’t a kids-only event, but kids were welcome. Why is that relaxed vibe so hard to achieve Stateside?
Here, we’ve turned parenting into an epic job, one that we mostly do alone and without (unpaid) help. So of course, kid-focused events seem unappealing and daunting to people who don’t have them. Of course, getting a babysitter and wearing something other than leggings on a Tuesday night seems unappealing and daunting to me, a mom.
But we have to do better. My relationships with people who aren’t parents are important to me, and making space for them is something I really value. Also, I really hate going to water parks. So let’s find some ways for us all to get along.
I never thought about our childcare crisis being a central theme here, I think you’re right! I think there’s another huge divide between parents: those that have family nearby that are ready and willing to help and those that don’t. I find those that don’t seem rely more on finding a tight knit group of friends with similarly-aged kids to function as that family-bench for extra childcare, but it’s still really hard with little kids. For what it’s worth, the childfree/parent divide got much easier for me once my kids were no longer toddlers. Swapping childcare is much easier, more people are able to manage them for longer, there are more activities they can attend where they are present, but not the focus. My childfree friends that came to the park when I had an infant and a toddler, I now try to go out of my way to see them without kids, to even out that imbalance.