Are the places you go adapted to your child? | ConnectionZen Blog

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Are the places you go adapted to your child?

Written by Laurence

Sunday, 07 March 2010 17:23

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Places are not always adapted to families of young children

It can be really challenging trying to live a normal life with very young children. They need to eat at fixed intervals, can't always travel really quickly and need a whole lot of paraphernalia taken with them. It's not easy!

Some places are much better organized to help parents of young children though. In North America, almost all restaurants can accommodate young children with booster seats, high-chairs, menus, toys and changing facilities. If you go to a restaurant in the US more often than not crayons and paper will be brought to your table and there will be special menus with juice and child-friendly portions.

This is not the case throughout the world. In many parts of Europe very often restaurants will have neither high-chairs nor booster seats. Forget about the changing table and the crayons. It makes it very difficult to bring children into this kind of establishment, but then maybe that's the point!

From personal experience, we've been in department store restaurants that won't warm children's food in a microwave for fear of being sued. This was House of Fraser in the UK, and was completely over the top and against all common-sense. In Belgium, one of the largest shopping malls in Brussels has no baby change at all and toilets require payment!

In Canada, for example, most shopping centres not only have extensive and practical child changing facilities, but also have breast-feeding rooms.

An ideal child-friendly establishment would have the following:

changing facilities accessible to both men and women (men look after children too!)
bins and shelves/surfaces next to changing tables
paper towels rather than hand-dryers
a step for kids to stand on to clean and dry their hands
boy-level urinals
breast feeding facilities (for a mall etc)
high-chairs and boosters that are clean and in a good state of repair
disposable bibs
non-spill cups with a straw
child-sized portions of adult meals - kids shouldn't be offered just junk food, they'll happily eat the same type of meals as their parents, just smaller portions.
crayons and paper or toys and books
a corner where they can play
practical lifts that are not always full and do go where you need to go

Not all of these points are applicable to each establishment, but just implementing the ones that are would be helpful!

Do you have any ideas to what makes a great child-friendly establishment?
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/37300654@N07/3434461360