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Random bit of pondering
Apr. 14th, 2013 11:31 pmThere's an attitude in the US right now (and I'll grant this may mainly be restrained to the white upper middle class) that you shouldn't really have to deal with children if you don't personally have children; that you should be able to have an adults-only life, and it's a burden that people with children exist in the same spaces (low-end restaurants, groceries, libraries, etc), although children have always been present in these spaces. It's possible that a certain percentage of the population has always held this opinion, and even that it's the same percentage, emboldened and made visible by internet message boards; it tends to run in the same circles that like to post pictures of their lunches, urban people in their 20s and 30s with strong opinions about midcentury modern furniture.
At a guess, I would say that it is a more common feeling now than it has been in the past, and emerged partly because it is largely possible to avoid seeing children (with patterns of urban development that have led to largely child-free city centers, along with the ability to conduct a lot of business through the internet), so it seems like a not ridiculous thing to say to the kind of people who say it, and feels to them more along the lines of "I don't want to go to a bar that only serves Bud Light," as opposed to something more in-your-dreams, like "I should be able to go out in public without anyone ever looking at me."
However, I also wonder whether TV has something to do with it; as child labor laws have become stricter in California and as television has moved to a single-camera style instead of multi-camera (necessitating much, much longer shooting days), child characters have been all but written out of television. Unless you're watching a show that is specifically about (and usually for) children, you see teenagers and older, usually played by actors who are in reality 18 and up. Shows only include children if they absolutely have to; where in the past a writer might have given a character a kid as a humanizing element, they go with a cat, because it's easier to get that greenlit.
This idea occurs mainly because of Brazil's well-documented drop in average family size that closely followed the introduction of popular telenovelas depicting smaller-sized families.
At a guess, I would say that it is a more common feeling now than it has been in the past, and emerged partly because it is largely possible to avoid seeing children (with patterns of urban development that have led to largely child-free city centers, along with the ability to conduct a lot of business through the internet), so it seems like a not ridiculous thing to say to the kind of people who say it, and feels to them more along the lines of "I don't want to go to a bar that only serves Bud Light," as opposed to something more in-your-dreams, like "I should be able to go out in public without anyone ever looking at me."
However, I also wonder whether TV has something to do with it; as child labor laws have become stricter in California and as television has moved to a single-camera style instead of multi-camera (necessitating much, much longer shooting days), child characters have been all but written out of television. Unless you're watching a show that is specifically about (and usually for) children, you see teenagers and older, usually played by actors who are in reality 18 and up. Shows only include children if they absolutely have to; where in the past a writer might have given a character a kid as a humanizing element, they go with a cat, because it's easier to get that greenlit.
This idea occurs mainly because of Brazil's well-documented drop in average family size that closely followed the introduction of popular telenovelas depicting smaller-sized families.
