The Importance Of Making Spaces Child-Friendly (Not Child-Centered)

If you’ve been a parent for any amount of time, you’re all too familiar with the “Do Kids Belong Here” debates. Should kids be allowed in breweries? On airplanes? At nice restaurants? In public before they’re 18 and perfectly behaved? It can be really disheartening for anyone seeking a life that does entirely revolve around their children. TikTok creator Rachel Klinger Cain (@iblamebill) eloquently explains the importance of having child-friendly spaces — particularly in regard to community organizing and activities — and how that’s very different from child-centered spaces.

“I want to talk really quickly about how I perceive the difference between being child-friendly versus being child-centered,” she says, “I think we need to be child-friendly.”

She goes on to explain that she was a mom before she went to college and had been to parent-teacher conferences before she became a teacher herself.

“I noticed something about parent-teacher conferences: They were very inaccessible to parents,” Klinger Cain continues. “Because they did not expect children to come to conferences with their parents.”

When she would show up to conferences with her children, she says, she was greeted with surprised reactions. No teachers told her she couldn’t have her children there, but it was clear that they hadn’t been expecting the kids and it made her feel uncomfortable.

“Like I was breaking some unwritten rule I didn’t know about,” she confesses. “And I was a little embarrassed.”

She contrasts this reality with the fact that teachers and administrators are often frustrated by parents not attending conferences and think that it demonstrates a lack of interest in their child’s education.

“They talk a lot of sh*t about parents,” she muses. “But they don’t put a lot of thought into what they might be doing that makes it so parents don’t want to come, or better yet don’t feel able to come.”

So when she became a teacher herself, she knew she wanted to do better by families. Though she taught high school, she understood that some of her students would have younger students that their parents might have to bring along to the conference. So she gathered things that she happened to have in her room — poster paper, crayons, Play-Doh — and set them up on a table in the back of the room.

“And sure enough, I had a couple of families that came with children!”

Klinger Cain would greet the parents and the child, and then let the kiddo know that there were things for them to do at the back table. The kid was entertained, the parents were immediately relieved — clearly, they hadn’t done anything wrong by bringing their child; their child had been expected and welcomed — and conferences went well.

“I never went over to that kid,” she clarifies. “I never played with that kid, I didn’t entertain that kid. I didn’t have to have a conversation with that kid. I had just set up a table, in the same room, for them to have some stuff to do.” This didn’t take much time, and it didn’t cost anything.

So the next time parent-teacher conferences rolled around, she sent an email to her colleagues to let them know about her successful strategy and offered supplies for anyone who needed to borrow them. Not a single teacher took her up on the offer... but that didn’t stop those colleagues from sending three kids to her classroom during her conferences.

“They told the kids that my classroom had been set up as a space for kids ... they had made me a caretaker, and they had put extra work on my shoulders,” she recalls. “And that was child-centered. What I had been doing was child-friendly. It was a message of ‘kids are allowed to be in this space’ ... what they had done is say that ‘kids aren’t actually allowed to be in the classrooms; they need to be in their own space where they’re being entertained by someone else. It needs to be focused on them.’”

There’s nothing wrong with child-centered activities, she says, but that’s different than welcoming children into your space — expecting that they will be there as just another member of the community. Child-centered is fine, but requires a volunteer or funding to provide a child-centered space, and that’s not always possible, making some spaces inaccessible to people with children.

“We all pick up on whether we’re actually welcome or not,” she concludes, “and to feel welcomed you have to feel expected.”

Because a community means all of us.