Shit can get weird at the soft play

People talk about soft play like it’s the seventh circle of hell. Probably, if you go at peak times at the weekend, it can be. I guess, particularly if you have multiple kids with you, you’re on your own and you actually like those kids and want to keep a bit of an eye on them because it’s hard to keep up with them on apparatus designed for small people. Further, and perhaps most importantly, other people’s children can be horrible. There are a lot of other people’s children there.

I went with the Boy today, off-peak, in term-time and left the Girl at home with a still ill but slowly recovering partner. So one child, quiet soft play, limited number of bigger children to cause him grief. And it was a delight. He can still only mainly do the under 5s corner, but last time we went a few months ago he couldn’t even really do much of that. So he had a lovely time going down the “big yellow spiral”, climbing “up really really high” and going really fast on a roundabout thing until he fell off and hit his face on a plastic Wendy house. Fair play to him though, he got straight back on.

That was all fine and wonderful, but some other things happened that I want to talk about because they were weird. They’ve got one of those ride on car things that you put a quid in and it goes back and forth a bit, you know, like at a supermarket. It’s a Peppa Pig one. Peppa and George are in the back and the kid sits in the front. A boy was in it. A boy apparently set free by his parents. He was probably about 4 and still had a dummy, which I was internally judgmental about to begin with. He was sitting in there pretending to drive, as they like to do. We waited for him to finish his turn. I used my best grown-up passive aggressive skills – “you’ll have to wait for this boy to finish his turn”. He didn’t finish his turn.

Instead, our Boy satisfied himself by going on this fucking strange buy awesome light-up disco horse for a bit. Even after that, it apparently still wasn’t his turn.

So we gave up and headed off to do something else, then the boy followed me, tugged at my sleeve and asked me for some money to put in the Peppa Pig car. What the actual fuck. He’s still only little, of course, he doesn’t really know what’s what – but asking a random stranger for money seems pretty out there to me. Obviously I didn’t actually tell him to fuck off, but I gave him my best WTF face and told him that I didn’t have any money.

Later, back in the under 5s zone, I’d climbed up by the “big yellow spiral” (which, by the way, was not easy for a man of 6 feet 3 inches) to keep an eye on the Boy and Peppa Pig boy comes up to me and just gently strokes my head. HE STROKED MY FUCKING HEAD. Now I know from our own Boy that my relatively new closely-cropped hair is fuzzy and that this is both interesting and fun for small children, he probably just wanted to check that out. But I’m a big, strange man who he’s never met (I’m not counting the previous request for car finance as us being formally introduced.) I was nice, you sort of have to be, I asked him if it was fuzzy, he mumbled something through his dummy, I backed swiftly away.  Because WEIRD. And also, because being touched, let alone stroked, by a child stranger feels 100% wrong even when you know you’ve done nothing wrong.

None of this is the boy’s fault of course he obviously doesn’t know what’s inappropriate, awkward as fuck or even potentially dangerous. But no parent intervened on either occasion. I did not once see a parent with him who might point this shit out. It seemed he’d been left to roam entirely freely – and if you’re 4, why wouldn’t you ask a random grown-up to pay for your Peppa Pig ride if nobody’s there to tell you that shit isn’t appropriate?

And this is the thing with soft-play. Kids are knackering and they are relentless. Part of the appeal is that it’s a relatively safe space where parents can set them loose to have their own fun and do broadly as they please – which is an important thing for their development. I’m a big advocate of giving your kids freedom to make their own mistakes and learn from them. But, Jesus, some don’t even seem to cast a cursory glance in their children’s direction the whole time they’re there. The dicks. If you don’t see them making their own mistakes you can’t explain to them that what they’re doing doesn’t fly.

There’s a dance you have to do when your children are doing something wrong like snatching a toy or pushing another child. You tell them off in ear-shot of the other child’s parents (who already know it’s not really the child’s fault because they’re too small to understand), they tell you it’s fine (but you still feel like it’s really not fine and OH MY GOD THIS IS SO EMBARRASSING) and you go your separate ways. Nobody likes this dance, but it’s just part of the deal. But there are motherfuckers not doing the dance and that leads to children begging for money and stroking the heads of strange men and that is so much worse than the dance. Let’s dance.

In the end, we did get our turn on the Peppa Pig car, I even put £1 in. The Boy told me it was his favourite thing of the whole day so, that was worth 2 hours in the soft play and all that awkward shit then.