I get on my high horse

Ready for another instalment of my series ‘Things Are Different in Spain’? Good. 

The attitude toward children is totally different here. Maybe it was just due to the nature of the demographic of the Northern Beaches* where I’m from, and where I spent... many, many years working in retail, but parents at home seemed so often to treat their children as chores. Not all of them, obviously, and I can think of many exceptions, but  the attitudes of lots of parents seemed to be one of eye-rolling frustration, and their main interactions with their offspring seemed to be screeching at them to be quiet, sit still, and be more like a little doll that can be put away when it isn’t needed. I’d see people shopping with their children at the mall for the first time at about nine in the morning, and then I’d see them again and again over the course of the day, for hours and hours, until two or three in the afternoon. Usually by this stage the kid was reduced to delirious whinging due to sheer mind melting boredom and the total inattention of the parent. 

I know I’m being a bit unfair, and I fully accept that the people I was seeing represented a certain type of parent, and not all parents. And I also know that until you’ve actually had kids, it’s unfair to judge other people’s approach to parenting. And I further acknowledge that part of the problem is that people who don’t have children sometimes resent the intrusion of kids into what they think should be a grown-ups only milieu. But I still feel that there is a tendency in Australia to treat children as tiny, annoying idiots, and it is pretty unusual to see small children out at dinner, let alone at a pub or bar. 

But kids here are part of the social landscape. Everyone smiles indulgently at them, no one shouts at them, or minds when they run about. As a result, their behaviour is amazing. They tend to play together unobtrusively, they talk to adults politely and are in general pleasant to have around. And I think it’s due to this treatment that the kids here seem paradoxically both older and younger. Older because they have the freedom to run around with other kids while their parents sit in a cafe or bar, safe in the knowledge that all the adults in the area are keeping half an eye on them. And younger because they’re kids, and are treated as such, not as tiny, annoying idiots. 

Apologies if this has ended up sounding like a second-rate anthropological study, but the difference in attitude has really struck me in a big way. This just seems like such a great place to raise kids, not that we’re making any plans in that direction. But I do think that Australia has a lot to learn from the Spanish example of how to treat kids, and that we’d be much happier if we could incorporate this way of doing things to some degree. I say this as someone who has been guilty of rolling my eyes at people who take kids out to expensive restaurants and then let them run wild. But I hope I’ll go home with a new attitude to children in restaurants and cafes, now that I’ve seen that it can be done, and done well.

*Rich and bored