We were at the soft play/ skating monthly home ed meeting for the first time in months on Monday. The older two skate, and the younger two very much enjoy soft play. I took crochet and got on with igglybuff 😉
The set up of this particular venue is that the roller skating rink is at one of of the very long building, there’s a cafe and seating in the middle, and then the several storey high soft play is at the other end. Many of the home ed families congregate near the skating, but with two little children, I always wind up sitting by myself in the soft play end, along with other non home ed parents of small children.
There are lots of signs. Under 2 area, 8 children. 4 and under, {number of children}. Socks must be worn. Parents are responsible for their children at all times. Do not climb up the slide.
The signs are pretty much uniformly ignored, and I found myself wondering what the point of them actually is.
Children learn from the world around them. My younger children can’t read the signs, but I read them out, and require them to follow the guidelines. This leads to a certain amount of unhappiness when other children don’t. Sometimes I remonstrate with other children – like when there are a bunch of larger ones divebombing the play balls where it’s supposed to be 4 and under. I try to be quite mild – things like “could you be a bit careful” and “this area is for the little children”. I usually get stared at as if I’m speaking a foreign language, before being completely ignored.
I could go and try to find a member of staff to deal with the issue – but that’s telling tales, and is frowned upon generally speaking.
I could go and try to track down the parents of the children who are misbehaving, but I’m not very good with confrontation either.
We discussed this whole thing in the car on the way home. The rules, I suspect, are mainly to keep the management from being sued. To make it someone else’s fault if a 10 year old lands on a baby. But the fact that the rules are completely unenforced just means that the children are getting the impression rules don’t matter.
So what happens next? What about when they’re a bit older, perhaps, and they learn to drive a car? Do they then decide that all the rules on the signs at the side of the road don’t apply? Like the ones with the speed limits in them?
The other side of the coin is that with the rules, you can abdicate decision making and personal responsibility. In terms of driving, a speed limit is not supposed to be a target speed, but you do find that it is. In reality, we should be driving according to the road conditions – but with the amount of information we’re constantly flooded with, it can actually be difficult to do that. So on the way home, an overhead sign came on with “is your car ready for winter?”
Thank you for asking. Did you really need to ask while I was driving along a busy dual carriageway, with rain and sunshine, and far too many people in far too much of a hurry? No, you really didn’t. But you could, you’ve got that big expensive sign there after all, so you did.
I’d like fewer signs. And fewer rules. And more actual thinking. What do you reckon?
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