‘The hard lessons learned in soft play interactions’
Bill Linnane on imperfect kids and parents
In 2018 I wrote a column stating that soft play areas would be the source of the next plague. In mature reflection and recollection I now realise that I was wrong. However, like any opinionista, I am not going to retract and recant, but rather I am going to double down and tell you that I wasn’t a million miles off, even if technically it is more than 9,000km from my local soft play area to the city of Wuhan.
With their intoxicating mix of lukewarm food, insufficient seating, and general funk, indoor play areas are a purgatory for us breeders trapped between the hell of being stuck in the house with your kids on a wet Irish weekend, and the heaven of seeing them tire themselves out with minimum effort on our part.
I love them because I can work — you would think that the sound of screaming and mysterious odours of a soft play zone would be a distraction, but it actually helps me write, because it’s either hammer the keys like Jerry Lee Lewis or have to watch my kids misbehave. And besides, you don’t need to watch, as every parent knows the sound of their own child crying, even in a place where at least 60pc of those present are screaming for various reasons.
This was brought home to me on one trip to the local soft play area when I was roused from my keyboard mashing by the sound of my youngest in hysterics. I spotted him quickly, and with a sinking feeling I clocked that it was a mother who was making him cry, while she held her equally distraught daughter. Clearly, he had done something wrong. So I set my face to ‘deepest sympathies’ and dragged myself over to see what the commotion was about.
Apparently her little girl, who was about the same age as my boy, had been trying to get up some steps but wasn’t going fast enough, so my little chap thought to offer her some encouragement in the form of a dig or shove. I didn’t doubt the story, so I stumbled through an apology, telling her that as the youngest of three boys my son was used to a more robust form of interaction. This did not defuse the situation. She countered that her daughter also had two older brothers and they didn’t rough her up. She was right, of course — the ‘boys will be boys’ clause has been used to excuse appalling behaviour by men for centuries and frankly it needs to be binned. Tolerating violence — or even endorsing it — in men has led us down a long, dark road; feel free to flick over to the courts page for confirmation of same.
Realising that I was heading towards a lengthy debate about gender, identity, masculinity and male rage, I apologised again a few more times, she continued to berate me and my child, but we finally wrapped it up. She went back to her group — because, of course, it was a group — all of whom were now glowering at me; I went back to my table with my young offender, got his shoes on and exited stage left, pursued by some shame.
I can sit here six months after this and tell you that I would have handled it all differently, were it my child who was on the receiving end of a dig from another kid. And on many occasions it was me in that position— deciding whether
‘Tolerating violence — or endorsing it — in men has led us down a dark road; feel free to flick over to the courts page for confirmation’
to berate or not to berate. With four kids, you are always going to have these moments where you can intervene and start lecturing someone else’s child (and then that child’s parent) or you can simply tell your child to stay the hell away from said child (and you can stay away from said parent).
I am a fairly non-confrontational person and there has only been one time when I have thought it necessary to give out to a child that was not mine — that occasion was when a 10-year-old boy in our estate told my then 10-year-old daughter that she ‘put boy’s willies in her mouth’. I told him not to say things like that again, to stay away from my daughter, and that was that. Within a week they were happily playing together again, proving my intervention almost completely pointless. I could have marched down to his house and shouted at the first parent who greeted me, but what does that change? No parent gets it 100pc right, and no child is perfect. We are an imperfect species, prone to outbursts of temper, at any age.
But these are the hard lessons that are to be learned in the soft play zone — how to mumble an apology, how to quietly fume, and how to get a child’s shoes on in under 10 seconds whilst running to your car.