I wonder whether today’s parents would take more interest in their youn goffspring in buggies if they did not possess mobile telephones.
I wonder whether babies and young kids now in buggies will suffer later in life because their parents preferred paying attention to their mobile phones rather than their little children.
All public transport buses in London have dedicated areas for buggies (baby strollers, push-chairs etc.) Other passengers need to, or are made to feel that they need to, move out of the way so that a buggy can be parked in the designated area. So far so good. Many child carers use their childrens. buggies as shopping trolleys, often overloaded with bags of merchandise. Often, the child or children being transported in the buggies are removed from them during the bus journey and then occupy a passener seat. The empty buggies then simply take up space that could be used by other passengers on a crowded vehicle.
Now, there are clear signs by the designated ‘buggy area’ that state quite clearly that the area is also for use by persons confined to wheelchairs. These signs also make it very clear that wheelchair users have priority over buggies in the special area on the bus.
Clashes, often quite uncivil, occur if too many carers pushing buggies are competing for the the limited space available for buggies and wheelchairs. Or, even worse, battles can break out between whelchair users who want to board a bus and buggy owners, who are already on board the bus. Both the child carers and the wheelchair-bound people can often behave quite unpleasantly. Unlike the wheelchair occupant, almost all baby buggies can be folded up and placed in the luggage area that is available on every bus.
Yesterday, it was a sunny afternoon and I was travelling in a bus past Swiss Cottage in north west London. The buggy/wheelchair area was occupied by two baby buggies and a folded buggy was in the luggage area. We stopped at a bus stop where a man in a wheelchair was waiting. He wanted to board the bus, but the owners of the buggies occupying the designated area would neither fold their buggies nor leave the bus to make space for the priority user, the wheel chair user. The bus driver had to get out to sort out the stand-off. He wanted the buggy users to disembark, but they would not budge. In the end, the wheel chair bound fellow behaved decently, saying he would wait for the next bus.
In my opinion, both wheelchair passengers and buggy pushers can easily manage to wait (especially when the weather is good) until a bus arrives with sufficient space. After all, the wheelchair user is sitting and waiting as is the buggy borne child, who is often far too big and independently mobile to be confined to a buggy. What do you think, dear reader?
Picture from: https://www.britax-roemer.co.uk/pushchairs/strollers
Young parents sometimes ask my wife and I when it is safe to take their baby abroad for the first time. Why they ask us is a mystery. We are not experts on child care. Our experiences in this field are confined to our only child, our daughter.
We first took our daughter abroad when she was six weeks old. We went on a driving trip from London to Belgium and Holland. After about an hour driving through northern France, our daughter began crying plaintively and continuously. We stopped, removed her from the baby seat, fed her some milk, and that brought the complaints to an abrupt end. At that stop, both my wife and I had separately thought that we were not too far from home to turn back and abandon our trip. Neither of us expressed this thought verbally when we stopped, but later we discovered that we had had the same idea.
Several hours later, we arrived at our destination, Damme, which is close to Brugge (Bruges). After settling in the hotel, we found a restaurant nearby. It was Saturday night. The restaurant occupied a long room. There were tables on both sides of a corridor that ran the length of the room. Most of them were occupied by frumpy-looking, late middle-aged, middle class Belgian couples, none of whom seemed to be having fun.
Soon after we settled at our table, our daughter began crying. She was hungry and my wife wanted to breast-feed her. She asked the head waiter whether there ws somewhere secluded that she could breast-feed. The waiter pointed to a back room. When my wife stood up, the hitherto silent and rather glum Belgian diners became animated. They told us that they did not want the baby to leave them. From that moment onwards, all of the diners cheered up and became lively, firing us with questions and advice about our tiny daughter. It seemed that our arrival was the best thing that had happened to them for many a year.
A few months later, we took our child to India, and that was also a successful trip. So, if you are crazy enough to ask my advice (based on a sample of only one) about travelling with a baby, my answer would be “go for it.”
Picture from argos.co.uk
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