Jayne Dowle: Critics should turn an eye on fine art of parenting

Ivan Hewett, a newspaper critic, and Dea Birkett, director of the organisation Kids in Museums, are locking horns over this just in time for the half-term holidays. Incensed by a couple who let their little darlings climb on a $10m Donald Judd sculpture at Tate Modern, Hewett argues that children should be kept out. Birkett takes the opposite view. Culture should be open and free for all ages to experience, she says. Institutions should go out of their way to welcome youngsters. And me? With two children aged eight and 11? I would be affronted if anyone banned my two from anywhere, and so would they. However, I say this with a major caveat.

It’s not children who should be banned. It’s some parents. Those who do allow their children to clamber over the exhibits as if they were so many climbing frames. Those who let their little ones run up to the artworks with sticky fingers outstretched. Those who sit drinking coffee in the café seemingly oblivious to their toddlers rolling around under the table in the mess of discarded kiddy meals. I could go on, but I might put you off visiting a place of interest ever again.

I’ve been there and bought the “I survived a museum with kids” T-shirt in the shop many times. I speak as one who once had to march out my son Jack, then aged seven, from a big display of mining banners in Barnsley because he started swinging on them, to my mortification.

A big open space with lots of shiny things on display is like catnip to a child though. They go mad. They race around. They jump up and down. They yell and point and want to feel everything and touch everything and test everything to see if it breaks. That is, if you let them. It’s your job as a parent to guide them through this strange and alien place. Set some boundaries. Give them some idea of how to appreciate the objects of interest without wanting to take them all home in their back-packs. Actually engage with your children in the space. Don’t drag them along and expect them to fend for themselves, or indeed, expect activities to be automatically laid on. In other words, take a bit of responsibility for your own offspring.

Yet, I never cease to be amazed at what parents allow their children to do. I hate to generalise, but I will. I can almost guarantee that the parents who don’t discipline their children in public are usually the ones who are the first to complain that poor behaviour in the classroom is damaging their learning. Ask any teacher. The notion that it might be their very own little darlings who are the ringleaders of the trouble is beyond their comprehension. The parenting pendulum has swung so far that the notion of adults having any authority at all is evaporating. That’s why art critics paid to write about art are bothering their brains with talk of gallery bans.

And this is why the debate goes much further than the hushed confines of the art gallery. If we are prepared to talk about banning children from here, does this mean they should also be banned from supermarkets and shopping centres? Indeed from any place not designed specifically for their pleasure and entertainment? If we take the argument to its logical extreme, this is what we are looking at. Do you want to live in a world where children are kept away for their own safety and that of others? I certainly don’t.

There are times, however, when I’m stood in a queue waiting to be served when I am tempted to imagine such a totalitarian state. In the Post Office recently, I watched aghast as a mother allowed her two children – they looked to be about five and six – to literally run riot. When they got bored of swinging on the barriers, they jumped in and out of the photo booth, pulling the curtain back and forth. Then they decided to race each other up and down the counter. And then, probably because she had got herself so excited, the little girl started wailing and demanding that she needed the loo. The mother just looked exasperated and shrugged her shoulders. The rest of us just looked at each other and raised our eyebrows.

If that had happened in an art gallery, at least you would have the choice over whether to stay and witness it or leave. Unfortunately, what happens in front of the priceless exhibits doesn’t stay in front of the priceless exhibits. It carries on out, into the café – out through the shop, onto the street and unfortunately for us all – into society and eventually adulthood. We think it’s bad now. What will happen when these over-indulged, highly-privileged children become parents themselves?