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.”
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.
Why I reported this
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 intuitive than it once did, and a lot of adults feel quite uncomfortable interacting with kids.”
Often, we’re left with more questions than answers. Is it rude to tell a kid not to touch your game console or tchotchkes when they’re in your home? What should you do if they don’t listen? Is it okay to be judgmental of other kids’ behavior (and of their parents’ unwillingness to intervene) in public? Is it ever appropriate to say something?
Taking a more honest and communal approach to parenting benefits everyone: kids, parents, and non-parents alike. By establishing boundaries and getting into the habit of interacting with children, we all can feel more comfortable living in a multi-generational society. Here’s what parenting and etiquette experts have to say about dealing with three common types of kids.
The kid who’s misbehaving
The eternal issue with “kids these days” is that they aren’t being brought up the same way as other generations were. You may have heard of gentle parenting, a newly common and well-intended approach that focuses more on boundaries and understanding than punishment. Instead of correcting a child’s behavior with directives, adults acknowledge their feelings and motivations and give them choices. Overly permissive versions of the practice, however, have enabled children to “rule the roost,” Pezalla, who has studied gentle parenting, says. (Proponents say it still involves “positive discipline,” setting expectations, and maintaining boundaries.) Instead of telling a kid not to throw toys at another kid, gentle parents might try to explain to their toddler why they feel the urge to chuck stuffed animals. “The priority of gentle parents is emotion regulation of their children and also themselves,” Pezalla says. “The last thing that they wanted was to flip their lid, was to yell, or was for their kid to yell in a public place.”
But kids don’t do well with this kind of subtlety, Pezalla says; she argues that, in fact, they learn more when an adult raises their voice or is visibly angry. Seeing an adult’s emotional reaction is how they know they’ve crossed a line. This doesn’t give adults carte blanche to be rude or mean to children. Instead, it can help to have established boundaries with your friends who are parents: I know kids have a lot of energy, but I’d really appreciate it if you asked your kids not to jump on the furniture.
And if you’re hosting a family dinner and your nieces and nephews are running amok, a stern “Don’t touch that vase — go play outside” gets the message across and is well within your rights. “Kids are very used to having to learn the different rules for different environments, and in fact, that’s a part of learning and growing up and realizing we don’t behave at the grocery store the way we behave in our playroom,” Lizzie Post, co-author of Emily Post’s Etiquette: The Centennial Edition, tells Vox. If you’re welcoming someone else’s children into your space, it’s appropriate to set the rules and expectations. And if parents can’t wrangle their child, or refuse to, maybe you hang out at their house or a park in the future.
But your stepping in is just as likely to be welcomed by exhausted parents. In her research, Pezalla has found that parents are often grateful when other adults lightly discipline their kids. This materialized in her own life when a neighbor told her 12-year-old twin boys to stop climbing on construction equipment. “I was like, thank you so much,” Pezalla says. “Please proceed in yelling at them. If you see them up on there again, yell at them and feel free to text or call me.”
Lisa Sibbett, author of the Substack The Auntie Bulletin, has carved out a role for herself as one such adult. An auntie, Sibbett explains, is an adult deeply invested in the rearing and well-being of a child they may or may not be related to. “One of the real marks of an experienced auntie is that we’re comfortable getting other people’s kids in trouble,” she tells Vox. “And there are some kids in our lives where we are fully authorized to do that.”
The kid who can’t be left alone
In 2024, the motherhood and “slow living” influencer Bethany Fontaine posted what she considered an unpopular opinion: Children should spend more time with their parents than with their friends, teachers, or coaches. While most people would agree with this sentiment generally, the post seemed to resonate most with a growing proportion of parents who’d rather keep their kids on a short leash, which, in turn, might breed kids who feel increasingly uncomfortable entertaining themselves. One estimate found that young Gen X parents spent 52 percent more time with their kids than boomer parents.
As Meg has witnessed firsthand with many of her friends, “their parenting style is to pretty much be with the kids 24/7 and just make sure they’re not feeling left out in any kind of way,” she says. She’s been hesitant to address the clinginess with her friends because it feels like a referendum on their parenting. Her way around any awkwardness is to give her friends a heads-up that she loves their kids, she’s happy they’re here, but she might need to step away at some point if she gets overwhelmed by them. “I’ve seen when I’ve said no to their kids, the kids blow up because they’re not used to it,” Meg says. “And then later that day, I notice the kids will…seem more centered and calm around me, as if they feel safe around a person with boundaries.”
It’s unrealistic to expect anyone’s kids will be entirely absent if you’re entering into their home, and creating space for children will likely make it easier to continue to see your friends after they become parents, but parents should also give kids space to play by themselves or to be cared for by another adult, Post says. “When I was growing up, you did not interrupt Mom if she had a friend over,” she says. “We always had to say, ‘Excuse me.’ You don’t just come up and demand this person’s attention, and you give adults space.”
Post suggests setting expectations with your friends on which hangouts are adults-only and encourages parents to respect that their friends may not want to hang out with their kids all the time. “Personally, and not having children, I do really appreciate my friends who try to balance that out,” she says. It also means parents might need to be intentional in setting aside dedicated time to spend time with their friends beyond when their kid is at school or dance class.
The kid having a meltdown in public
It’s a fear among many parents: their progeny completely loses it at a restaurant or in a store. That, somehow, everyone else’s kids are better behaved than their own. “That’s a deep, serious existential fear for parents: People aren’t going to like my kids, people aren’t going to want to be around my kids. Rather than experience their children being rejected, they would rather cocoon in their own home,” Sibbett says. But when kids cease to exist in public spaces, the rest of the world forgets kids are loud and messy and a little bit chaotic, and they might lose their tolerance for coexisting with them altogether. So banning kids from public spaces (or expecting their parents to not bring them to the grocery store or to Target) isn’t a practical or kind solution.
If you see a kid completely melting down in a public place, experts agree it’s best to hold your tongue unless there’s an issue of safety: the kid is about to run into oncoming traffic, they’re knocking glass jars off the shelf in the grocery store, etc.
In the event that a child you don’t know is doing something that directly affects you personally — maybe they’re pulling your hair while standing behind you in line — Post suggests addressing the parent and asking them to tell their child to stop. “I think that when kids truly misbehave in a way that is invading another person’s space like that, where you’re kicking something I am sitting on, you’re throwing something that hits me, I think you have actually quite a lot of standing to be able to say knock it off,” Post says.
But if a baby or toddler is screaming in public and they aren’t invading your personal space, you simply have to deal with it. It’s part of existing in the world with other people. “Everybody’s kid is a little bit of a monster — and I say that with deep affection,” Sibbett says. “Children are just not socialized to act like adults. And so they make big messes and they make big noises and they have tantrums.”
In all kid contexts, we could stand to have a little more grace for one another, Pezalla says: grace for the parents who are trying their best, grace for people without kids who aren’t as familiar with the specifics of your child’s schedule and temperament, grace for the kids themselves who are living with big emotions.
“All that we can do is to lean in toward more of that old-fashioned intergenerational caregiving space where we just all have eyes on each other’s kids and where there’s more of an acknowledgement of the messiness of caretaking children,” she says.
Have questions about how to navigate specific social situations involving other people’s kids? Send a note to allie.volpe@voxmedia.com and we may address your dilemma in a future article.
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