How to deal with other people’s kids

Interacting with children has gotten a lot less intuitive, even if you’re a parent yourself.

Meg didn’t want to swing, but it didn’t matter. Her friend’s kid wanted her to swing.

What was ostensibly a hangout for Meg and her friend was quickly overtaken, as it usually is, by the kids’ desire to be entertained. On the third hour of playing with her friend’s children at a park, Meg, a 38-year-old who asked Vox not to publish her last name so she could speak freely about her friendships, received the request to join one of the kids on the swings. She was nursing a coffee and was perfectly satisfied just pushing the child, and she told them as much. “The kid totally flipped out, like, started crying, threw a fit,” Meg tells Vox. “Then my friends were looking at me in this way of, could you just sit on [the swing]? … Because then they were like, ‘We’ll sit on the swing with you.’”

It isn’t that Meg doesn’t want to interact with her friends’ kids at all, but after a few hours of entertaining them, she’s hit her limit. She also hopes to avoid seeming like she’s calling their parenting into question, but she feels the need to set a boundary with their kids, to say “no” every once in a while. But therein lies the tension: Is causing a friend’s child temporary discomfort worth it to preserve her own sanity?

“It’s a strange tightrope to be like, I’m so fucking proud of you. You’re doing amazing,” Meg says. “But also your kids drive me nuts.”

Culture reflects society. Get our best explainers on everything from money to entertainment to what everyone is talking about online.

Interacting with kids in today’s world has never been more perplexing. People are having them later, and if they do, they tend to spend much more time with them than generations past. At the same time, society can feel segregated into distinctly kid-friendly and kid-free zones, and should a child cross that boundary into an adults-only space, people on both sides have strong feelings. Given rampant American individualism and the weight placed on the nuclear family, raising children can feel like an act that happens behind closed doors and is done only by a child’s parents.

As a result, many people — even parents themselves — are less practiced at interacting with children but may suddenly find themselves thrust into child-adjacency once someone in their lives has a kid. Unaccustomed to dealing with them and unsure of the norms, they want to avoid harming a kid or stepping on another parent’s toes. The consequences of avoiding children run the gamut: people don’t build relationships with the kids in their lives at all, they botch any interaction they have with kids, or they come to consider them public nuisances.

In newsroom-wide conversations about kids, a central theme emerged: I don’t really know what’s appropriate to do or say around someone else’s children. Even parents themselves were slightly dumbfounded about how to act around their kids’ friends and their friends’ kids. To address some of these pain points, I spoke with experts who had clear advice for how adults can better interact with children, regardless of whether they’re parents.

“There’s greater anxiety about boundaries, about judgment, about liability, especially,” Annie Pezalla, a developmental psychologist and teaching professor at the University of St. Thomas, tells Vox. “Interacting with kids feels a lot less........

© Vox