I try to avoid having too many “pet peeve” posts that focus on the negative, but it’s been a while so I think I can turn in a chip. Also, this post is not meant as an indictment of any current or past wards in particular, but is a more generalizable gripe. Matter of fact, for the most part our wards have bent over backwards to accommodate our clan of ruffians. For example, yesterday I did the thing where one parent brings all of the other kids to church while the mom can stay home with a newborn. The mission president sitting right behind us engaged my little children in conversation when they started getting rowdy and he could tell I was overwhelmed, and I had multiple “you’re doing great”s and offers of help, and nothing in the below should be misinterpreted as ungratefulness for all the kindness people in my current and past wards have shown us.
Now, with that being said, with the exception of people arriving late and not wanting to interrupt the sacrament, the foyer is primarily for people with rambunctious kids who would otherwise be disrupting sacrament meeting. Others are welcome to stay there, but they are not entitled to the same level of equanimity and peaceful quiet as if they, you know, just went into the cultural hall (I promise the adults don’t bite).
This hasn’t happened recently, but occasionally you go into the foyer with a screaming child and get dirty looks from the people out there. With things like this I have a bit of an attitude (not a good thing, I recognize), so I typically either ignore them or if it’s a bad day I give them a dirty look back. (Sometimes it’s more subtle, like that awkward look when they try to be polite when my kid is smashing my other kid into the sofa right next to them.) Kids are sometimes going to be kids, and the foyer is for vectoring that energy when you’ve lost the battle to keep them from disrupting the sacrament meeting. As an adult you can always just go into the cultural hall; me and my kids can’t.
Plus, this is one of those gendered things. If I get Father-of-the-Year looks from people just for being at the park with my kids, I’m sure the foyer bad-parent looks are worse for women, or at the very least the foyer looks get wrapped up in all the other bad parenting anxieties that come with the being a mother in a society that is built around childless people that don’t recognize that sometimes kids are just kids. (“Did you ever, you know, think about teaching them how to sit still,” “NO, THE THOUGHT HAD NEVER OCCURED TO ME”).
And yes, we all know about the family with the four girls in matching bows that sit quietly coloring during sacrament meeting (or, heaven forbid, actually listening to the talks). And I’m sure later in life they’ll have other, teenage girl issues to deal with; the fact that they don’t, say, rip off that hymn book holder thingie from the back of the pew like our boys have done multiple times this past year doesn’t mean that their parents’ parenting philosophy is superior or, when the dust is settled they will be any more functional adults, just that they weren’t born with the destructive energy of Atilla the Hun (and yes, there are some girls with the destructive energy of Atilla the Hun, overlapping bell curves, yadda yadda).
But in the meantime, boys will be boys, girls will be girls, and when you see an apathetic-looking parent with a wild child or several running around, it’s not that we don’t care, we’re just tired, but it’s nice that there is a space in church for people like us. Please don’t try to take that away from us by colonizing it with your expectations for cultural hall-level quietude.
Kids are kids. If there are not rowdy kids in your sac mtg you are in demographic decline.
How is your stake conf experience? I do not judge parents of rowdy kids for not showing up. 2 hours is to long for a pack of under 10 year olds.
At our stake conferences they typically have overflow rooms, so we’ll have one parent with the littles in one of those while another sits with the older kids in the cultural hall, since I don’t want the older kids to miss it just because of the younger kids. One year we kind of hung out in the back beyond the last row of chairs–that kind of worked. They had the same arrangement in my stake growing up, and I still remember when dad told us that we had to sit in the actual two-hour meeting, which for an eight-or-whatever-year old was practically POW solitary confinement.
In addition, people without rowdy kids should go sit at the front. It’s the worst when arriving late with wild kids to have to sit up front at the only open pews where everyone can watch you fail at parenting.
I know this will stir up a hornet’s nest, but thanks for broaching this topic. The foyer is there for a few reasons, and one of those is as a place to take kids who are active (or unruly, or disruptive, or…). I find that the crying babies in the chapel don’t bother me much, but the wandering, runaway children roaming the aisles is just so hard for me to handle. Sometimes they escape – kids are crafty like that. But when I see a parent simply uninterested in reining them in, well, I get very judgmental and irritated. Yes, that’s my flaw. But at least recognize that your blissful ignorance impacts many of the others in attendance. And…there’s a perfectly good foyer out there for your use! Am I a curmudgeonly old person? Yeah, I’m getting there, and it’s getting worse. I know we like to think of ourselves as a community, but that doesn’t mean that people should expect the management of their children to be a communal activity. There’s more rant there, but I’ll stop and let others retrieve their pitchforks to come after me.
I am enjoying this thread so far, and will add my 2c worth. Wandering small ones don’t bother me; it seems that a ward sacrament meeting is [ideally] an extended-family gathering, and thus the kids might feel motivated to wander around. They don’t actually distract us unless we choose to ‘notice’ them; I find that focusing on the speaker’s face allows me to disregard – or be oblivious to – small movements below my gaze. And – in my opinion at least – the kids are safe and will not get lost, as long as everyone plays along and keeps in mind whose kids are whose. YMMV
not using my name today!: That’s actually a really interesting perspective because crying babies in the chapel can’t be so readily ignored, and for most part such sounds are quite unpleasant. whereas, as Raymond points out, the wandering child can be ignored, but it’s good to know that for others the preferences are switched.
If there isn’t a child or two acting up in sacrament meeting, what am I supposed to pay attention to?
Tangential thought, but in studying Church history, it was fun to realize that this has been a discussion going on in some form or another since the beginning of the Church. There’s even an account from an elite woman visiting the Mormons in Utah from the east and complaining about how many children she could hear in a meeting in the Salt Lake City Tabernacle!
And I imagine with the TFRs of 7 in pioneer Utah, the child-to-adult ratio was much, much higher, and the consequent background noise probably much louder than what we get now–one of the consequences of us not squirreling them away in nursery during the main service like many other traditions (not that I’m saying that we should).
For some added historical context of kids in Sacrament Mtg (although just one person’s experience), my mom’s dad died when she was 1 and me grandmother was pregnant with my uncle. My grandmother said that when she was a single mom with 2 kids (1950s), multiple ward members told her she didn’t need to come to sacrament meeting while the kids were little bc “they didn’t need it”, but she determined that she needed it and so brought her kids to Sac mtg anyway. This was in Springville, UT when Sac mtg was Sunday evening. The impression I got was it was quite common for kids to attend Primary during the week, but that little kids often stayed home from Sac mtg, that it was more of an adult mtg at the time. I could be wrong.
Good job not taking your newborn to church.
Not long before the birth of my second child, my ward’s meetings were moved to a Lutheran church down the road while our meetinghouse was renovated. The wonderful acoustics of that Lutheran chapel were a mixed blessing because the noises of my children carried strongly. I and my children spent a fair amount of our sacrament meetings outside on the front steps of that chapel. I had not realized before the advantages of the sound dampening qualities of the Latter-day Saints’ chapels.
Stephen, we need to have a serious talk about what part of the building is the cultural hall.
Lol, I thought it was just the main meeting area, including the area behind the partition, but as I think about it I guess it just means the area behind the partition not including the chapel. The things you get wrong after decades of membership.
As the oldest of eight children, the father of two, and a 3x nursery worker, I’m with you Stephen. If we wanted our church experience to be free of disruption by children, we’d have Primary during sacrament meeting like everyone else does. President Nelson changed a lot of things about our Sunday services but he didn’t change that, so that’s where any complaints can be directed. (Assuming a good-faith effort by the parents, which you should pretty much always assume. Children vary a lot in their ability to sit still, both between families and within families, so no reliable inferences can be made about parenting quality. Judge not.)
A counter-intuitive suggestion, probably for later: Growing up, we sat in the back as you’d expect, until one Sunday morning our parents shocked us by announcing that from then on we’d be sitting right in the front. And it worked–behavior improved overall and the frequency of having to take someone out to the foyer was reduced. For me, that was when I started paying attention to talks, sometimes anyway, because the speaker up close was a real person trying to tell me something. For my younger siblings I suspect it was more about being aware the speaker and everyone else could see what they were doing. Obviously that only works for children past a certain age, but think about it when the time is right.
Side notes: Consider John Mansfield’s comment if you’re ever inclined to compare your ward choir with a choir you heard in a different church, or a concert hall. And the cultural hall is where you play basketball–what’s so hard about that?
My two cents: Be skeptical of your impulse to interpret a fellow congregant’s facial expression as a “dirty look.” Maybe they’re not judging you for bringing your rowdy kids into the foyer. Maybe they’ve had an awful morning, or maybe their face just naturally looks stern.
@RLD: That’s a good idea, and I’ve noticed something similar with sitting in the back with more space and sitting in a pew. When the children have more space in front of them they feel freer to play around more, but when they are limited by the bench right in front of them it sort of contains their energy.
Genevieve: That’s a wise, empathetic point. When we’re sensitive about something we’re more likely to read people as responding to that thing.
Stephen C,
As a veteran of the children-in-church wars may I suggest positioning a parent on either side of the children on the pew with consistent enforcement on either end. I know that some of the wilder ones will go with the covert “under the pew” maneuver but an alert parent can usually drag them back to the DMZ. Parents can also limit activities to the more reverent category such as picture books, coloring, etc. Wheeled vehicles have to be carefully monitored. Also parents have to be attentive. No digital devices, reading or napping for parents. And don’t let local leaders or speakers distract you! Children are usually clamoring for attention.
For critics of children being children, the most beloved woman in our ward is a veteran grandmother who brings a bag of little treats and coloring books with her for each sacrament meeting. More than one wiggly child ends up on her lap or next to her quietly coloring. No reverence, no treats! Sometimes parents (especially single parents) need assistance in giving attention to the kids. She is the MVP of caring for children during a worship service.
Yes, we’ve done the parent-on-the-both-sides thing. One problem with that is that with enough kids there is a middle area where the child-to-adult ratio is a little high, and that’s where the chaos migrates to, so sometimes we’ll intersperse the older kids with the younger kids, but then of course the younger kids who are successfully cordoned off feel like they’re missing the party and try to do the under-the-bench thing. It’s quite the chess game as I’m sure you know. That woman sounds absolutely angelic.
Given the fact that I am careening rapidly through middle age and toward geezerhood, while, at the same time, I have escaped the sustained attention (and, often, even the mere notice) of the Fairer Gender in its entirety, I’m afraid I have nothing of substance to contribute to the irreverent children wars. It is, of course, axiomatic that, in order to have irreverent children, one must have children in the first place. I know how the process works, biologically, in theory, but I’m afraid my exposure doesn’t extend much beyond that.
Perhaps those who are impatient with [allegedly] irreverent children should give more than passing thought to the unqualified declaration of the Master, who said, “Suffer the children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of Heaven.” (There was no reverence qualifier attached to that declaration.) And perhaps we ought to rethink what reverence actually is, since a lot of us are exceptionally good at putting up a front when it comes to appearing to be reverent on the outside, while, on the inside, many of us are anything but.