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FIRST PERSON The Trouble with Tots

It’s not that I hate children, but enough is enough.
By ELLISE GUNNELL |

WE ARRIVED LATE FOR THE Christmas Mass at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church. At 11:30 p.m., the church was packed; the service had started a half-hour before. The choir sang in Latin, and the trumpets tooted. A pregnant pause followed, and then, a sharp, ear-piercing cry from the row in front of me cut through the quiet. The man quickly glanced at the woman who dug in her purse for a cracker for the velvet-dressed cherub sandwiched between them. It was 11:53. The teary-eyed, red-faced baby chewed on a saltine and then scooted across the floor toward an elderly woman sitting nearby. At 12:05 a.m., during the chorus of “Silent Night,” the baby let out a shriek that made my eyebrows stand on end. For the next hour and 10 minutes, the child cried.

I don’t hate children. In fact, some of my very best friends have them. But enough is enough. New parents seem to think their adorable likenesses are as portable as pocket calculators. And they may be. However, pocket calculators don’t cry when their batteries run down.

RESTAURANTS, ONCE AN ADULT ENJOYMENT, HAVE TURNED INTO playgrounds for the rough and rowdy. Eating out is not the special occasion it used to be-now most families behave as if they were at home at the kitchen table. As parents sit idly by, sipping a third cup of decaf, their children run around the restaurant, becoming an accident waiting to happen. Meanwhile, waitresses and waiters must skillfully maneuver through the mayhem to avoid tipping their trays of enchilada platters.

Perhaps parents are too tired to discipline their children; or maybe, they don’t know how. “There’s a lot of tension and ambiguity about how children are treated in public,” says Texas Christian University anthropology professor Andrew Miracle. “Children used to be seen and not heard, but over the last 25 years, different rules have evolved. Possibly in keeping with Montessori techniques of child-rearing, people are less willing to curb the behavior of their children in public places.”

If you can’t keep them in their chairs, leave ’em at home. Or, take them to a restaurant where segregation is the rule. La Tosca, an upscale Dallas eatery on Inwood Road, now has a special section for families with children. The upstairs area now serves coloring books, crayons and building blocks along with tortellini della Nonna. The Dallas Restaurant Association predicts this trend will continue to grow. Let’s hope so.

In other public places, the nuisance factor is just as high, but the answer may not be as clear-cut.

A trip to the mall is no longer the strolling, peek-in-the-shop-windows experience it once was. I’ve learned to dodge the mall walkers, trekking toward me in their pastel warm-up suits with hips flying left, right, left, right. But now a languid sea of strollers, sometimes two across with bulky shopping bags dangling from the handles, has made shopping more like a ride on Central Expressway, creating a logjam of traffic that is almost impossible to penetrate. Like bumper cars at the state fair, once you’re surrounded by two or three babies on wheels, you can’t move-until they do.

The nearest store can appear to be a refuge. But don’t be fooled. Inside the stores, the little monsters are set free-to topple store mannequins, pull down dozens of carefully stacked sweaters and play hide-and-seek underneath the racks of dresses. In New York City, before they’ll let you shop in a store, you have to check your bags at the front. Why can’t parents check their children?

It’s all right if parents insist on bringing baby along, as long as, like cigarette smoke, he or she doesn’t annoy others. Airplanes could make the old smoking sections “family sections”-that way, all of the little screamers could be seated together, and the Extra Strength Excedrin would only be needed for the last 10 rows. The same system could work for buses-parents and children could be seated at the back. Cab drivers have bulletproof partitions to protect them from robbers-why can’t we. the child-free, be protected from crying children?

Remember the old crying rooms at the movies? These soundproof rooms were designed to confine the most shrill, shrieking baby cries within their walls while the rest of the theatergoers watched the movie in peace. Mark Merry, marketing director for the Southwest division of AMC Theatres, says we probably won’t see the revival of crying rooms in his theaters-the cost would be prohibitive today-but the chain has instituted a policy that keeps parents from bringing children under 3 to R-rated movies after 6 p.m. It’s part of the chain’s “Silence is Golden” policy. At six bucks a seat viewers should be free of screaming children (as well as those people who sit behind you who’ve already seen the movie twice and preempt every other scene with “Now pay attention to this-it’s verry important”).

However, instead of finding ways to keep the little ones out, some public places actually encourage their attendance. Not even the thought of a high C note breaking the hushed first few bars of Ravel’s “Bolero” is enough to stop the Dallas Symphony Orchestra from allowing children to attend its performances.

Trendologists agree that children are everywhere-the nation’s baby boomers have given birth to a bona fide “baby boomlet.” Though Martha Farnsworth Riche, director of policy studies at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C., says that 1990 was the boomlet’s peak year and that the birth rate is now on the decline, the damage has been done. We’ve become a city, and a nation, divided-into those with and those without children.

The segregation between the haves and have-nots is apparent. Marilyn Garner, a Dallas lawyer and mother of two, notes: “I really don’t feel comfortable in the home of a single person. Most likely, the home won’t be childproofed, and I can just see my son putting some artifact into his mouth or knocking over a vase.” Susan Howard, a Dallas real estate agent and have-not, says she has lost contact with most of her friends who have children. “If I can’t discuss baby poop and the PTA, they don’t have anything else to talk about.”

The gulf will continue to grow. Census figures indicate that the so-called traditional family, a married couple with children, is no longer the most common family type in America. In 1990, married couples without children outnumbered the traditional family. Experts predict a new “family” to top the chart by 1994: the single-person household.

As society becomes more divided, the frustration between the haves and have-nots is also bound to increase. And those not on the parent-track will need to be pacified, too.

I’ve had it with today’s laissez-faire parents. Until they grow up, their children never will.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no such thing as a child-free zone. But a few years ago, there weren’t any no-smoking sections either.

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