Children should be seen and not heard

What is this? 1992?

I want to tell you about something that happened when I was at a Costa the other day without my children. (I know, this is my life now and no-one is finding it more strange than me, I promise you that.)

“Strange seeing you with no kids in tow”, my friend texted me after spotting me at the bus stop.

“I know, it still feels weird.”

I was in Costa writing in my journal. I was enjoying the quiet of the post-school run, before the town starts to fill with people and before most of the shops open. Time to breathe and gather my thoughts. It was quiet, that is, until a lady sat across from me with a child, probably an age in between my own children, dressed as Elsa and with a voice to match.

I was disheartened, obviously to have my quiet disrupted and I couldn’t help but show that I lost my train of thought on more than one occasion as the little girl sang, or danced around because I paused writing. I tried to show apathy in ignoring her, but every time I stopped, pen poised over paper, it was met with the mother shushing her daughter, telling her be quiet, the lady is working.

I reassured her that I didn’t mind - really I didn’t, I love the bustle of cafés that is why I go there and not the library, for example. I tried to tell her I have kids, too. I tried to tell her I know what it’s like to be her - to be wishing your child would just sit quietly for two minutes so you wouldn’t feel you have to neck a piping hot drink and leave the vicinity of people doing important things. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t a problem, but she scooped up her daughter and left before I could try.

I have felt uneasy recently when I have seen social media posts that have gone viral where a family have sent a message around a plane apologising in advance for their new baby’s inevitable cries. Uneasy, because it sets the tone that the baby is somehow in the wrong, yet it needs to cry to feed, to be understood, and what right have we - people who may prefer a quieter flight - to deny that child those basic human rights?

Children are not meant to “be seen and not heard”, despite what we have been brought up to believe.

It made me wonder if when I have been in situations when I have thought my children were unwelcome, if I have constructed that narrative of the situation myself. Much like the family who send the message around the plane, they are both assuming the other passengers will be unhappy with the disruption and narrating their child as the problem from the start. A self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way.

Have I, like the mother of the little Elsa, constructed the narrative whereby I have assumed someone is unhappy with the level of noise we are creating as a family, or that other people have felt my children are unwelcome in their world, when in fact they haven’t said anything of the sort.

Or perhaps I had communicated it, without really intending to. That the learning is too engrained for my body language not to communicate it.

It’s true to say, of course, that I have had plenty of experience of feeling this way and being correct in feeling unwelcome. For example, walking along the high street slowly, with my son, who is 4 has tiny legs and is trying to walk longer distances, and being in the way of an older man, who clearly has no patience. My certainty in our being unwelcome was cemented as he cried out “for God’s sake!” and barged past us. Or when we get questioned on the bus for taking a priority seat so that my son, who is an infant and cannot stand, can sit near his own mother who is standing with the buggy. How dare you take up a seat, I see in their eyes.

I have had so many experiences of not feeling like my children are welcome, of not feeling like I as a stay-at-home mother have a welcome place in this world, that perhaps it isn’t a surprise that I might have constructed those narratives upon those that didn’t deserve them. It is a sort of defence mode and I was likely saving myself time and energy - saving ourselves from the confrontation that in my mind was likely to come. Similar to that sense of constantly apologising we do as women, how we feel the need to make ourselves smaller, quieter - less of a problem. Perhaps I knew too well how the lady was feeling and knew her exit was inevitable.

But there have been times when we have been made to feel welcome, though and people’s actions have dispelled my fears and I wonder if I can learn something from those experiences, so that I can reassure parents in this situation again. So I can be less of that person I never intended to be.

One such example is when we have been on the first off-peak train of the day into London and I have been trying (and failing) to control the excitement of my young children as they shout loudly amongst the silence of the commuters. My anxiety stopped as soon as someone started a conversation with them - asked them questions about where they are going, what they like to do. In hearing them it made me feel like it was okay for them to be heard.

Accessible places and cafés where there are books, or small play areas have always been welcoming in that they attract similar sorts of people. Like I said, in going to Costa, I knew what I was letting myself in for, despite it being a so-called “work day” - there are other places more suited to a silent drink, yet there are lots of places too where children are encouraged to be children. Those places are so valuable.

Perhaps it is inevitable that we might feel as mothers like we are intruding on spaces meant for others, but now how I felt about that morning was that I had intruded on their space. The little girl was having a great time spinning around, swirling her glittering blue petticoats singing Let it go, and it was a problem because I was there. Or because I didn’t say well enough that it wasn’t a problem.

Thinking back I definitely could have been more friendly, perhaps, to signify that I genuinely didn’t mind - I could have involved the girl in a conversation and given the mother time to drink her drink. But in a way I am still hungover from the exhaustion of my two - the newly disrupted nights and the overwhelm. I may have said I didn’t mind, but I didn’t show it. And maybe that’s the weird thing. In a way my silence, trying to ignore the girl, it didn’t make me not hear her, but it meant that I was not heard.

It is strange to find myself in the other person’s shoes, but I think it is teaching me more about myself as a mother and as a person, and I am still learning every day.

Have you ever felt embarrassed by your children’s behaviour in public?
How have you been made to feel welcome with your children in public places?
What do you think: should children be seen and not heard?

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