In reference to this

ackb:

lemdi:

it’s another one of those things where I’m just URGH because half of that is reasonable requests and the rest is absolutely ridiculous.

Parents have every right to expect their kids to be welcome at certain kinds of events. Non-parents (and parents!) have the right to plan events where the kids aren’t there, because sometimes parents want to get away from their (and all) kids.

People hosting you have no responsibility to provide childcare, toys, and snacks, unless your kids were expressly invited to something. Nor do they owe your kids anything beyond basic respect. The exception to this is professional/academic conferences where not offering childcare expressly excludes women, but that’s a different issue.

You should expect, as a parent, that your friends are respectful of your status as a parent and the fact that in many cases your kids will be with you. You shouldn’t be demanding things from them. Kids are people, and they do deserve respect, and the absolutely 100% deserve to have an introduction and to be asked permission before being touched.

But this woman is going beyond.

Ok. So here’s a thing I can’t stand about stfuparents, though. It’s taking something completely out of context and layering on whatever assumptions the reader might have. Everyone talking shit about this woman is assuming that her audience of fb friends is their audience of fb friends. And maybe that’s true, right? Maybe she’s being a fuckhead. I have no idea because I don’t know her. If you’re imagining she’s saying this about her friends’ friday night parties and weddings and whatnot, sure, what an asshole, fine.

But context makes a difference. When I read her post I was reading through my eyes as a religious educator. When I read “our community” I think church. Her post reminds me of the dozens of times I’ve addressed the boards of purportedly “multigenerational” congregations to try to get them to understand that if you want to have a multigenerational community—if you want to grow your church—you have to offer childcare at your events. If you want your community to be welcoming to families, you can’t be accosting parents whose kids cry for five seconds during a worship service. Etc, etc.

Now, I admit, it’s likely that the context of the quote more closely resembles others’ understandings than mine, but what I DO NOT UNDERSTAND is how we can all be Cyber Bullying is terrible! and then jump all over the case of some random person we don’t know for saying something we have absolutely no context for. Why would you do that? A lot of people I really respect are jumping on this post to articulate their perfectly legitimate feelings of annoyance at parents, which is fine. But y’all are kick ass articulate people with a lot of good points to make, why the bullying?

I’m not regularly attending church, but when I read “community”, I interpreted it as religious as well. And yeah, I love being UU, but the congregation I grew up in skews older, white, educated, wealthy, and with no kids at home. I would like to attend services but I don’t feel that I could go with the kid— I scoured the website to see if they had accommodations for parents with babies and couldn’t find anything. So that’s one less person attending services, which means one less possible member, which means, to be crude, less dues. And it means I wait longer to get in the habit of taking Gabe to church.

So while I don’t expect everyone to bend over backwards to fix things to me and the boy’s liking, I do expect that some things (family gatherings, daytime home gatherings, church) to be reasonably welcoming of a mom with a kid in tow. I’m not asking every bar to take kids (though I do have a list of bars that take them during the day), and I’m not expecting to bring the baby to your party. But the baby is also why I’m not attending your party (well, the baby or the fact that you only serve Busch Ice).

Hey Ipo, if you’re wondering about UUC, I’m pretty sure they have infant childcare — that’s the church I grew up in, and I remember the teenagers having Sunday morning gigs taking care of the babies. Also, every 4th Sunday is family service, and there’s tons of Sunday school programs that are super fantastic. More here. (erm, maybe that’s not the church you’re talking about, in which case nevermind, but just in case, now you know!)