You need a licence to drive a car but not to have children.
Call me old. Call me old fashioned.
There are things that should be and those that shouldn’t.
For a long time now I have been uneasy at the apparent laxness of the rules surrounding pubs, clubs and alcohol and children. Just tonight I saw a young girl of no more than 3 sitting on her dad’s lap AT THE BAR of a hotel. No one objected, the bar staff even joked with the child.
She was not the only one. Another toddler wandered in from the street into the same bar. Her mother followed her in after several minutes, obviously looking for the child, and rather than removing the child and returning to her seat in the open area immediately, remained in the bar with the child for several minutes. Whilst she returned with only the child, it seems to me something else occurred.
A crowded bar. Patrons drinking and having their usual Thursday night. What if one of them had been someone of less than scrupulous. The furore that would have been created over such an abduction would have more than overshadowed the place or the circumstances from where the child was allowed to be taken.
Last time I looked there were laws about who could and who could not be in a bar and they were very clear. Not only was this child in the bar seeking the companionship of her father with her mother was outside with friends in the apre dining area on the pathway adjacent to the street, but another of the group that ended up joining the bar fly child’s mother, trolleyed a pram, baby inside through the bar rather around the outside of the building on the footpath. It want as if the shortcut through the bar was easier than the circumnavigating pathway, the bar was full of patrons at the time, nor did the woman seem to be meeting anyone in the bar.
It wasn’t that she needed to make a purchase on the way to the “party”, that she waited until she had met with the party, then removed the baby from the pram, attached it to her hip and re-entered the bar to make her purchase. Flagrant disregard of the law.
You see it all too often. Children left to run riot in drinking establishments. Where are the licensing police, where is the bar staff. Where for that matter is the parental control.
In this particular time and place, children were playing on the street, the main street of the town. Someone quipped, it was probably the safest place and given the goings on in the bar, they may have been right. But the main street of the town?
Children are not there to be seen and not heard. I am not saying that, but manners and appropriate behavior are an enviable right of everyone else in the places. We go to a bar, a club or even a restaurant for an intimate time and to have the experience overtaken by unruly children who technically shouldn’t even be there, is more than an insult.
Yes I understand there are times when even the best laid plans can be thwarted and the children end up tagging along. But it seems to me more and more they are dragged along to any and every venue. Then left to their own devices as the intrusion of having children impinges of the good time to be had by their parents.
So what happened to the expectation of manners and control of the youth. Its not the children’s fault. Oh, you say, it should be taught in schools – RUBBISH. When did we relinquish the very core of the prodigy experience? Isn’t our duty as parents to install our values and ensure they benefit from the examples we exhibit?
When did the rules change? When did parental guidance become something to be the expectation of someone else?
You hear the screams of indignation when a child runs off the rails and commits some criminal act. Oh it must have been their tough upbringing, and not to cast shadows on those who truly have it hard, but how many times you see someone from a supposedly “silver spoon in the mouth” existence or what should have been a “perfect” upbringing become some sort of out of control criminal.
Where does it start. Perhaps it starts in places like this.
So the question is not, where are the licensing police, the real question is where is the licensing of parents. You need a licence to drive a car but not to have children.
Maybe that is the real problem.
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