Parenting fail

[lizbee]

A library bans unsupervised children under the age of twelve. This inspires fail.

Sorry, free-range parents, but librarians are not employed to look after your free-range children. And it's nice that your children are perfect. That might console you after they've been abducted by the local paedophilic library-lurker.

This also goes for bookstores. We have a game at work, where we spot the local pervert and kick him out of the store before he gets a chance to expose himself to children. It would be slightly easier if there weren't so many kids and so few parents in the kids section. So no, I don't have any sympathy for the people saying, "But forty years ago I spent whole days in my tiny rural library and never came to any harm!" I have sympathy for the kids, who have to go with the police when their parents don't respond to pages because they've popped out of the store to buy movie tickets.

(Thanks to sister_ananke for the link. I really needed that blood pressure spike.)

Comments

[thirdblindmouse]

Sorry, free-range parents, but librarians are not employed to look after your free-range children.

Unless they are libraries which employ children's librarians. As a kid (in a major city not-so-many years ago) I hung out in such libraries. ...Happily, the children's librarians never stopped me from wandering into other areas of their libraries, even though in those areas I was unsupervised in the presence of strange adults.

Sorry, free-range parents, but librarians are not employed to look after your free-range children. And it's nice that your children are perfect. That might console you after they've been abducted by the local paedophilic library-lurker.

How 'bout a publicly posted policy of "We react the same to obnoxious children as we do to obnoxious child predators: we will kick them out. If your unchaperoned kid are then mingling on the street with perverts, that's entirely your fault." That way libraries and bookstores won't be treated like looking after other people's kids is their responsibility, and kids won't be even more overprotected and cut off from the world than they already are. How are these larval humans ever supposed to become real humans if they are isolated from all learning experiences?

[lizbee]

Unless they are libraries which employ children's librarians.

No, the person who brought this to my attention is a children's librarian, and her job involves a hell of a lot more than babysitting.

How 'bout a publicly posted policy of "We react the same to obnoxious children as we do to obnoxious child predators: we will kick them out. If your unchaperoned kid are then mingling on the street with perverts, that's entirely your fault."

What about the perverts in the libraries and bookstores?

[thirdblindmouse]

No, the person who brought this to my attention is a children's librarian, and her job involves a hell of a lot more than babysitting.

Sometimes children's rooms have things like readings, events at which IIRC children are left alone with a [possibly non-]librarian in charge of them. I could be wrong; I've never worked in a library with a children's room.

What about the perverts in the libraries and bookstores?

Good point; those would also be parents' problems, what with libraries and stores being public and semi-public spaces.

[trouble]

I used to work in the World's Largest Indoor Amusement Park. It was also the place to hang out if your goal was child abductions.

Parents used to get really really pissed off at us when they'd leave their kids (under 10!) with no supervision in our playpark and we'd call the police.