Unpopular Opinion: I Let My Kids Run Wild in Public

And maybe you should, too.

When my son was about two we brought him to a beer garden in DC that turned out to have a working historic fountain right in the middle. In my bag I’d brought several Hot Wheels cars, as I did for most outings at that age, and almost immediately he began driving the cars up and over the low sides of the fountain, then driving them out again, and running their wheels over the hot concrete to make tire tracks. He was wildly entertained by this, and my husband and I were happy: we were able to chat with our friends and drink a beer while he played car wash in a 19th century heirloom fountain. It was a win-win.

But then another family with young kids showed up, two daughters, the younger one a little older than my two-year-old. Her eyes grew wide as she watched my son running his cars in and out of the fountain. She tugged on her dad’s arm.

“Can I play, too?” she asked.

The dad looked at my son, splashing away in the historic fountain and scowled.

“No, we don’t play in fountains,” he said, and quickly pulled her away.

Up until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me I’d done anything wrong. My son was having fun in the fountain, and yes, he was splashing water out of the fountain a bit and yes, the fountain was maybe a little dirty, and now that I really paid attention, he was kind of getting in people’s space a bit as he wheeled the wet car around the concrete patio. But none of that had really felt like a problem to me until the other parent told his kid it was the wrong thing to do.

Suddenly, I felt bad. The truth was, I hadn’t been out much with my two-year-old in public spaces like this. He was born in May 2020 and visiting a beer garden was a relatively new experience for parents who became parents in a pandemic. Was I doing something wrong? Is playing in fountains in public spaces… bad? I felt like we’d broken a rule I didn’t know existed, like I’d failed some kind of parent test. Of course you aren’t supposed to let your kid play in fountains. It’s in the handbook. Except I never got a handbook, I just got a baby and later, a lot of Hot Wheels cars.

Over the next few years, it became clear I am the problem here. I notice everywhere I go, my kids (now I have two kids, four and two years old) seem to be the wildest kids there. At the neighborhood barbeque, my kids dash around a neighbor’s yard, in and out of people’s legs, grabbing food off the table, giggling and trying to get inside to see the owners’ cat. At the grocery store my son likes to pretend the grocery cart is a train and he stands on stuff and jumps aboard as I go past. And yes, even at restaurants, I let them get up and roam around a bit. They’ve only tried to get into the kitchen like, once.

But I notice, much of the time, we are the only family doing these things. I see other toddlers strapped into a grocery cart or a high chair or holding their mother’s hand. I don’t see a lot of other toddlers pretending to a be a frog and hopping their way down the aisle of pews at the National Cathedral like my two-year-old recently.

For a while after the fountain incident, I felt self-conscious about this. And sometimes I still do. Why are my kids so wild? I don’t think they are badly behaved. They’re not rude, they’re not pushing people or breaking stuff and certainly not knocking other kids down. But they are absolutely full of energy in a way that often feels way out of proportion to a lot of other kids I see in public. They’re always talking, always moving, always jumping, always making up a new game, or asking me to make up a new game or sing a song.

So many times on the internet I see these arguments about what kids should be allowed to do in public and where they should be allowed. Should kids be allowed in restaurants? Airplanes? Libraries? And so many times I’ve found myself and others saying things like, “how are they supposed to learn to behave in public if we don’t teach them to behave in public?”

But part of me wants to say... why do they always have to behave in public?

Here’s where it’s going to get a bit controversial.