2 hours ago
5
As a disapproving, noise-sensitive harpy who once managed to communicate “use headphones” to an Italian tween on a train despite us not sharing a common language, I ought to be the ideal candidate for the French rail operator SNCF’s new “Optimum”, no-kids-allowed carriages. The service was promoted last month as a civilised space in which executives could conduct important business in cosseted peace, unmolested by sticky fingers or La Pat’ Patrouille (Paw Patrol) blaring from an iPad.
Actually, though, I hate it – and a heartening number of other people seem to be hating it, too. The initiative sparked widespread indignation in France (the high commissioner for children, Sarah El Haïry, called it “shocking”) and beyond, leading SNCF to partly backtrack, changing the original “children are not allowed” wording to say the space is only inaccessible to under-12s.
I’m surprised SNCF thought this would fly, given France has been at the forefront of pushing back against the trend for adults-only spaces (last year, legislators started considering measures to outlaw them). However, a SNCF spokesperson said the company has been resisting pressure from rail users to create kid-free carriages for years. Which is depressing, but not surprising – it’s indicative of our increasing intolerance towards kids, and tendency to try to exclude young people from, well, life.
Exploring “children’s gradual disappearance from the public realm,” as one academic put it, the Atlantic recently reported that teenagers are also being excluded from their traditional hangouts, with shopping malls and amusement parks banning gangs of them, fearing such outrages as “horseplay, shouting, racing and other youthful actions” (cited by one Michigan mall to justify its policy). Cities such as Chicago and Washington have introduced youth curfews in some areas and one fast food outlet even requires under-18s to have a chaperone of 21 years or older. Things are similarly teen-unfriendly in the UK: last year, the Scottish nonprofit, A Place in Childhood, highlighted the lack of “safe, welcoming and unstructured space” for teenagers, who feel excluded from their own communities; “their play is too often policed, designed out, or simply ignored”. Then, having closed off other options, we complain they spend too much time alone on their phones.
Despite my innate crankiness, I believe none of us is entitled to a silent and frictionless passage through the world, and especially not on public transport or in other public spaces – the clue is in the name. For sure (as Emmanuel Macron would say), no one particularly relishes a long-haul flight next to a colicky newborn or wriggly, sticky toddler (and that includes their caregivers) – but that thing where parents apologetically hand out bags of sweets and earplugs to fellow travellers on flights like they are, in fact, the giant babies who need placating, makes me rage.
There’s an expression I often whisper to myself on trains, for example when a man who can’t sit quietly with his own thoughts for an hour calls a colleague to bore on about a spreadsheet. It goes: “Inconvenience is the price of community.” It also applies here: we live in society and that’s a beautiful thing (albeit full of people doing stuff we would rather they wouldn’t), and we need one another. We especially need kids – at a time of declining birthrates (deaths have just outstripped births in France), we’ll be depending on declining numbers of them in our dotage. We should be cherishing children, not making parents worry about going out with their babies or chasing teenagers back to their bedrooms (after all, we might need them to rescue us off a mountain one day, like those utterly unprepared grownups rescued by two teenage lads in the Lake District in January).
I’m not suggesting anyone’s heart will be softened, or opened to the radical possibilities of community, by the laughter of a child on a delayed CrossCountry train from Cheltenham to Cardiff. It’s more likely you’ll get kicked in the back repeatedly, be exposed to a cacophony of TikToks or get caught by a flying energy drink. But we can suck it up. Because while Whitney Houston was right, children are our future, they’re also our past – we were all loud, annoying, incontinent and inconsiderate once. Lots of adults in the LNER “Quieter” coaches still are.
