Some pubs not family friendly

Brickette, yes children are wonderful if brought up properly!
BUT the children referred to in the original gripe are the ones who are brought up believing that they are the most important members of the family and life revolves around them, in other words just plain spoilt brats!
They are the ones who think that other people are not important & do not deserve any consideration and unfortunately are the cause of the anti-child feelings many people have these days.
In the countries in Europe which are family friendly the children are indeed treated with respect but they are also taught to treat other people with respect. This is the difference between them & us!

I just got back from my new 'local' It had been closed for 6 months and new owners re-opened it today. I popped down after training practice with my team mates and their kids, about 7pm, to see some friends and welcome the new landlord........ I barely stood one foot in the door and the landlord abruptly told us to leave because we have children with us and his licence does not extend to children. A new law on me, hence looking online tonight and finding this thread.

It continues to shock me how unbelievably poor the people of England are with regards to children. Forgive me if I am wrong, but children are our future, they are a natural and massive part of humanity, yet they are, and as a result their parents are, so often treated as a sub-species that do not belong.

I think we need to take a page out of other cultures. Most other parts of Europe and the world are much more family friendly, and not suprisingly they also have lower rates of teenage crimes and pregnancy. This is because they are teated with the respect they deserve as little human beings and introduced to the world and its ways in a natural manor. Yet we carry on treating them as something that should be kept out of the way and pushed aside until they are old enough to be socially acceptable... no wonder so many of them then grow up to be thugs, kicking against the system.

Grumpyoldwoman (appropraite name), Polly, Norman...... your comments just epitimise everything I detest about this self centred 'no children please' attitude that Britons put up with and even endorse. Get with the times, children are a wonderful natural part of this world and they are here to stay.

Just experienced some terrible behaviour from a bar manager in London after the marathon on a Sunday afternoon. There were 14 of us with a couple and their 7 month old baby (who is still being breast feed). The manager was incredibly rude and rolled his eyes at his staff when I said it is actually legal that a child can be on the premises as long as they do not drink and are accompanied by an adult. He threw us all out!

Common-sense should prevail. Few if any customers -let alone landlords- want unruly or noisey children around. Few parents or guardians would want their children to overhear inappropriate language. A lot of this depends on the culture of the pub concerned. In the case of the UK's many country pubs, where they offer food as well as beverages, then children behaving like adults should be welcome and adults behaving like children should be discouraged.

Our local pub, 'The Woodpecker' at Wash Water in West Berkshire is run by a landlord who hides behind the fact that he doesn't have a children's licence [does this exist?] and regularly has 'Basil Fawlty style' fits if innocent parties with well-behaved children turn up to his pub for a meal.

The pub is not popular with the village, so the village has no cultural centre. The pub does a very low trade... but Arkells do not seem to care. Me? I vote with feet and eat + drink elsewhere. As a local landlord I rate him as very poor as he doesn't relate to, or cater for, the local people.

Some pubs not family friendly? It's very simple, seek out the ones that are. There are pubs and there are pubs come diner/restaurant type establishments.

Stop crying in your lemonade about it and seek a solution to your problem.

You make some very good points, grumpyoldwoman (I am sure you are not BTW !) Pre kids, yes, provided the children were well behaved and it wasn't late at night ... that I do object to, kids in pubs after 7 or 8 pm at night when they should be in a bed ... I had no objection. I love kids and think they are a positive asset to a pub environment provided they are not allowed to run around shrieking and generally being a nuisance. A well behaved, polite child is an asset to any environment, just as a well behaved dog is.

I personally believe part of growing up is to learn how to behave around adults ... and the best way to teach children this is to expose them to the adult world ... just like dogs. Both my child and my dogs as puppies were all brought into the pub environment right from the word go, and although my daughter has ADHD, she was always well behaved wherever she went. If she wasn't, then she was dealt with very smartish. Same with the dogs.

In the depths of the countryside where we live, we have a delightful mix of horse riders, walkers, dogs, children all having a good time. At the appropriate time, the kids disappear home to bed before they start to get tired and mardy. Frankly, if and when someone swore in front of my child, tough titty, as you say the environment is for adults and therefore parents of young children will have to put up with inappropriate language! Anyway, it's good for them. They have to learn that just because that nice man said "bugg**", it is most certainly not OK for them to do so!

I had and have a very robust attitude to bringing up children. Like my dogs, they do NOT rule the roost, us adults do, and they have to jolly well behave when in an adult situation. Lucky them for being allowed in the pub! As a child, pubs did not allow children at all, so my brother and I used to be stuck outside with a bag of crisps and a bottle of lemonade for hours on end in the car!

So Nikki, do you think that adults should not have anywhere to go where they can be in adult company with no children around?
They are not a sub-species but they are not grown up, & part of the process of growing up is learning about certain things at the right time & not being exposed to all of adult experience right from the start!
If all pubs were family friendly they would be very boring places indeed; most of them would no longer be able to offer live music unless it was bland pop suitable for small children, & people would not be able to have free conversation in case someone swore.
Think back to your life before you had children; would you have wanted to go to a pub like that?

Of course children are allowed in pubs and restaurants !! they are not some sort of sub-species, they are human beings. As long as they are with an adult, they are allowed in pubs.

My understanding of the law is that a child can enter a pub as long as they are supervised by an adult. I have similar problems and find that the bar man / woman gives all sorts of stories about not having the correct license for children. In reality there is no special license for children it's all down to whether the land lord wants children in the pub or not. I wish that they would be clear about if and have a sign saying "Children not welcome" or something. But, having said that, if they did then it is discrimination. Could they have a sign saying "Blacks not welcome"? - I think not!

You were treated very rudely, but I have to question why you even wanted to go to a pub? I can't stand being with kids in a pub. It is a place for adults and adult conversation. I think that the policy of 'fags out - kids in' is a bad one. As your son is 13 why didn't you take him to a restuarant?

My partner and myself absolutely refuse to use pubs who allow kids in. After all we do not go to play schools or anything to do with kids entertainment.

We have been told to watch our conversation as it might offend the kids. My friends have been told by a little brat that he objected to smoking. A woman up-ended her kid, changed the nappy and put the dirty nappy in a beer glass. When I complained she said that I 'should get a life'. There are buggies and screaming crawling kids everywhere. It seems that the smarter the pub the more you are harrassed by other people's ghastly kids. Working class pubs won't tolerate the type of behaviour found acceptable by the middle classes.

A nice restuarant would definitely have been a better choice for you.
Adults must be able to go and relax somewhere without having to take kids into consideration. After all, not everyone thinks that kids are the be all and end all of everthing. It wasn't so bad when they were 'seen and not heard' but nowadays, the kids just spoil adults enoyment. So keep them out of pubs and let the adults smoke if they wish. And, lets have the pubs and the pub toilets as clean as they were before the kids were let in.

Pubs are not for kids, keep them out, go eat in a restaurant if you want to eat. Adults need some place to go for a break for Christ's sake.

Speaking as someone whose children have grown up I think there are perhaps too many family friendly pubs nowadays.
A couple of years ago we went to our local pub for New Years's Eve as it is within walking distance and they had advertised a disco. What we didn't know until we got there was that they had decided to make it a family night out!
We arrived about 8.30 - 9 pm and found the aftermath of a particularly messy kid's party. There was rubbish & small children everywhere and it stayed like this for the rest of the evening.
The worst thing was trying to dance with infants actually crawling around the dancefloor! (And of course if any got stepped on it would have been our fault.)
When our children were small we either found a babysitter or didn't go out, & they didn't see in the New Year until they were a sensible age to do so.
I can never quite understand parents who do not want a night out by themselves every so often!