y thoughts are prompted by a recent restaurant meal at a seaside location that was utterly destroyed by the behaviour of a number of loose children. By loose I mean children who were wandering at will throughout the restaurant making considerable noise and causing indigestion in some of the more mature diners. In retrospect it was our mistake; a restaurant near a popular marina during a school holiday is likely to be frequented by large numbers of children even late in the evening and, of course, the problem is not with the children, per se, but in the way that they have been allowed to behave in public.
I reached my teens in the 60s and have watched the world change ever since. The authoritarian attitudes of my own childhood became outmoded very quickly and with emphasis on individual rights and freedom of expression; both the public and private behaviour of families changed significantly.
A well known woman journalist asked in a recent interview what was wrong with children behaving naturally on train journeys. She had already given enough detail for her listeners to form some impression by what she meant by “naturally”. This involved wandering about up and down the carriages, using the chairs and railings as gymnastic equipment and enjoying themselves in an unrestrained way with noisy accompaniment.
What is wrong with it? Well, there are many members of the travelling public for whom any attention or noise from other peoples’ children would be deeply unwelcome. These include an exhausted primary teacher heading home for some peace; a care worker or a police officer whose daily work involves harrowing details of children’s lives seeking some mental peace on a train journey; a deaf or hard of hearing person for whom any unusual noise is distorted and extremely frightening; an unwillingly childless person dealing with the emotional ramifications of their condition and trying to focus on other priorities; a bereaved, anxious or depressed person for whom social interaction is difficult, particularly when unprompted and with a child whose own communication skills may be unclear; an elderly person not used to having their privacy interrupted by strangers whether they be adult or child; an exhausted grandparent having completed their daily stint as an unpaid childminder requiring a little relief from nursery needs; and perhaps most interestingly of all, the full fare paying passenger who simply does not like young children, has deliberately avoided having any and avoids the company of those who do.
How you feel about this question is almost certainly closely related to your own child-rearing practices. Even within the same social group these may vary from the quite rigidly formalised to the extreme laissez faire. My husband and I probably found ourselves somewhere in the middle with slight tendencies towards the more formalised child-rearing i.e. we always thought that routines were in the interest of both child and parent. I am not smug enough to believe that this is the reason why all of our children were good sleepers. At least when they were very young we had our evenings to ourselves. From six weeks I made a point of bathing them, changing them and delivering them to sleep in their own room. An unborn baby has internalised the rhythms of day and night through the activities of the mother and I tried to reinforce this by making a clear distinction. It worked in our case, times four. I used to feel terribly sorry for the parents who were still night feeding or having interruptions at the end of their child’s first and sometimes second year.
Lest any reader turns away in disgust at my complacency, I should acknowledge that I was the mother of the three year old who was seen peeing into the indoor lake surrounding the Lord Mayor’s carriage in the Museum of London. And yes, I and his siblings pretended for a few minutes that he must belong to someone else!
I believe the needs of babies and children should be generously met but parents have rights too and some private time, even if they only use it to read the newspaper, can make the difference between being a happy, healthy reasonably well-rested parent and a person who is stressed beyond endurance. Unstressed parents are likely to bring up unstressed children.
In my observations of many happy and unhappy children I have formed the view that there is one thing that all children need and that is to know that their parents put them first, that in a world of conflicting demands and needs the two people closest to them will always be loyal, loving and forgiving. This simple emotional bond is at the root of healthy development and its absence is painful and destructive. On the other hand, for a young child to believe that they are the centre of the universe, that the whole world revolves around their needs and that they will be gratified in practical and emotional terms day in and day out, is extremely destructive. It is the way to breed egotistical, selfish individuals who have no concept of their appropriate place in the family, in the class in school and in society. These are the children who won’t wait their turn to ask a question, who jump up and down impatiently, who talk over other people and who sulk if they are not first on school sports day. They are also the kind of children who think it is acceptable to wipe their sticky fingers on the knees of a stranger in the same train carriage and who stand on the seats kicking rhythmically into the small of the back of the person in the next seat. Parents who hold this philosophy of child rearing will sit passively by while their children create misery for the public. The same is true at restaurants and in public events of all sorts. Who has not failed to hear the marriage vows at a wedding because somebody’s child has set up a screeching just at the precise moment?
All of this does not mean that I would like to revert to the ‘children should be seen and not heard’ culture of the past. Children flourish where there are rules and boundaries and learn these things early in life. A child who is allowed to interrupt adult conversations, even if it is between their own parents, will transfer that behaviour into other contexts, including school. A child who is allowed to wander away during family meals will do so in restaurants to the annoyance of other diners. It may be difficult to keep a young child at the table but it would be worth the effort, especially if family meals are adapted in style and length to suit the needs of the youngest.
There is of course a need for give and take. I still don’t think the woman who complained when I was pushing a buggy around an exhibition in Cheltenham some years ago was right. She and I were the only people in the exhibition and it would have been very easy for her to avoid us by starting at the other end. Another woman who shrieked at me in a haberdasher’s because my child had begun to cry was probably suffering from stress and on those grounds I forgive her. All of us depend on the next generation being brought up happy, healthy and socially responsible. This is why we pay our taxes cheerfully to medicate and educate other people’s children in the hope that in due course they will become the workers and leaders who will ensure that our culture and its values remain strong in the next generation. Nonetheless, except for this huge and involuntary contribution to the wellbeing of other people’s young, there are still those who prefer to keep their distance. Not liking babies and toddlers does not make you a bad person. So the next time you feel affronted by negativity from a childless person, you might just weigh up what they are paying to contribute to the upbringing of your children. And remember the more tax they pay the more they are giving towards your child’s future.
Next time I thought I might write in defence of those who dislike dogs, but that might be a bridge too far.


Lynne Taylor-Gooby is Headmistress of The Royal School, the first school to follow the diamond teaching model in Surrey. Boys and girls are taught together until Year 3, separately until GCSE and together again for Sixth Form. Mrs Taylor-Gooby has four children (two girls and two boys) and has long been an ‘unofficial expert’ on the different learning styles of children and their need for happiness and stability to fulfil their learning potential.