I usually make my trips to our downtown branch of the library during the week. Our huge, beautiful library building is located in the center of downtown and very easy for me to stop at when I am commuting to and from work-related activities, my favorite local deli and grocery store, or things I am attending for my kids. But, yesterday, I decided to take a Saturday morning trip to the library and was surprised to find the library swarming with parents of very young children.
I suppose Saturday is a perfect day for working parents to take their children to the library. The teen population is rather thin on Saturday mornings (whereas the library is usually stuffed with teens on the week day late afternoons when I normally stop by), so there is plenty of space for all the tots and toddlers. And it seemed that the rest of the patrons were much more relaxed on a Saturday and didn’t seem to be bothered by the noise levels of cries, screams and the books flying across the smooth floor of the giant, round, well-lit atrium in the center of the library.
Our library is one of those buildings with a huge, open, spiraling and wide staircase moving up through the center. Of course, this was covered with kids going up and down with and without the attention and hand-holding of their parents. The sounds of their shouts and calls echoed especially loudly in the acoustics of the atrium which made them all want to call out all the more. I sat for a while and observed, thinking about how much the world has changed since I was a child, where the library was a sacred, respectful place–now it seems to be a massive extension of a McDonald’s play land. When people complain that we are not a child-friendly culture, I imagine that it all depends on where one lives and on which days and times one moves about in public. Obviously all the Saturday morning parents who left their children unsupervised to run the aisles of shelves and jump on the cushioned chairs arranged in reading sections along the windows at my town library on a Saturday must feel like it was a perfectly safe and child-friendly activity…
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