What’s wrong with child-free zones?

A couple of years ago, an irate young male blogger wrote a post about how kids who get a lot of attention end up becoming annoying; he made wild (but wildly funny, if you look at it the right side up) generalisations about how kids in “Delhi and Chennai are the worst behaved” because “they’re brought up in environments full of doting female relatives.”

The blog entry, which happened to be posted around the same time as a few others that pointed fingers at how kids and their parents behave in public places, kicked off a huge debate on the Indian blogosphere. Mommybloggers, whom our unashamedly un-PC blog targeted directly by saying their kids were likely to be the most smugly annoying, took major issue with the blogger and others who held similar views about the disrupting effect children had on public places such as restaurants, cinema halls and airplanes.

Comments flew thick and fast; some popular mommybloggers took umbrage and called these bloggers openly intolerant of children. While the debate never degenerated into the kind of vicious trolling and name-calling that Internet disagreements often spawn, towards the end it all did get a little personal and heated.

I have a confession to make. At that time, I was the mother of a fractious one-year-old who made a simple dinner at a not-so-posh restaurant seem fraught with challenges, I felt guilty ‘betraying’ my tribe, and yet I was firmly on the side of the irate bloggers who had had enough of a child tapping on their heads while they tried to watch a film or standing at their table staring at them as they tried to enjoy a peaceful dinner — all with mommy and daddy smiling indulgently in the background. I really couldn’t see, and I still can’t, why the demand that certain spaces be made child-free is so very outrageous.

After all, when people pay good money to go watch a film or eat out, they are paying for an entire experience and I don’t see why my child or anybody else’s has the right to disrupt that experience just because they are, well, kids.

Gita Dayal, co-founder and coordinator of online parenting community Parentree.org, agrees with me that banning them from certain spaces, such as fine-dining restaurants, should not necessarily be seen as ‘anti-kids’. She tells me how when she is out with her children, she often asks them to “use their indoor voice”.

She also adds a new insight to the debate: that it is not fair on the children to be taken to places where they can’t be themselves and where they constantly have to be shushed.

Sometimes, though, the no-kids brigade tends to get a little unreasonable. I do get that some of their ‘demands’ are irreverent and tongue-in-cheek (and calculated to get a rise out of the often irrationally touchy mommybloggers), but I have seen comments about, say, children crying on flights and in trains that are plain weird and get a rise even out of me (the coolest parent on the planet, as I like to believe).

We do promise to haunt only the McDonald’s of the world, people, but do cut us some slack.