Children in Public Spaces: Why Are Adults Becoming So Angry With Them?

Children often remind us of our own unmet needs.

Every so often a story appears online about children in public spaces. A baby has cried through a long flight. A toddler has kicked the seat in front. A child has shouted, wriggled, dropped food, or refused to sit still in a restaurant, airport, train carriage or waiting room. The comments underneath are often predictable.

“There should be adult-only flights.”

“I didn’t pay all this money to listen to someone else’s child scream.”

“Parents think everyone else should put up with their choices.”

“I want a child-free section.”

Some of this is understandable. Flights can be awful. They are cramped, expensive, uncomfortable and often stressful before anyone has even sat down. People are tired. They may be anxious flyers. They may have saved for months for a holiday. They may be travelling for work, grief, illness or family difficulty. A crying baby in that setting can feel like one more thing the nervous system cannot bear.

So this is not an argument that adults should never complain, or that parents should never be thoughtful about other people. Children do need limits. Parents do have responsibilities. Public spaces require some consideration from everyone.

But something in the tone of these conversations feels worth pausing over.

It is not only, “This is hard to listen to.”

It becomes, “Children should not be here.”

It is not only frustration. Sometimes it sounds like disgust.

And disgust is different.

In recent years, the idea of adult-only flights and child-free zones has become more visible. Some airlines have experimented with adults-only seating areas, marketed as quieter spaces for passengers who want to travel without being near young children. On the surface, this can be presented as a practical solution: those who want quiet can pay for it, and parents may feel less exposed to judgement from other passengers.

There is probably a reasonable conversation to be had about this. Quiet zones, family areas, better seating arrangements and more thoughtful travel design might help everyone. Some people are more sensitive to noise. Some people are neurodivergent. Some people are exhausted. Some people simply want quiet. That is not in itself cruel.

But there is a difference between making room for different needs and treating children as if they are pollutants in adult life.

That is the part I find myself thinking about.

Children bring need into public. They bring it loudly, bodily and often inconveniently. They do not always bring it in a way that can be easily managed. A baby cannot say, “My ears hurt because of the cabin pressure.” A toddler cannot say, “I am overstimulated and have reached the limit of my capacity to regulate.” A young child cannot always say, “I am tired, frightened, hungry, too hot, too restricted, and I do not know what to do with these feelings.”

They cry. They kick. They shout. They collapse.

This is not because they are failed adults. It is because they are children.

That sounds obvious, but public reactions often suggest that we forget it. Young children do not have fully developed capacities for waiting, impulse control, emotional regulation, frustration tolerance or perspective-taking. These are developmental achievements. They emerge slowly, in relationship with adults, through repeated experiences of being helped to manage what cannot yet be managed alone.

Children, emotional regulation and public spaces

A small child on a delayed flight is not simply choosing to be inconsiderate in the way an adult might. A three-year-old who cannot sit still for seven hours is not making a statement about modern parenting. Often, the child’s nervous system has run out of road.

This does not mean anything goes. It does not mean parents should do nothing. It does mean that our expectations need to have some contact with child development.

Many adults struggle to remain calm when they are hungry, tired, trapped, uncomfortable and surrounded by strangers. Yet we often expect children to manage those same pressures with less brain development, fewer words and almost no control over what is happening to them.

There is something strange about that.

From a psychodynamic psychotherapy point of view, strong reactions are rarely only about the thing in front of us. They may be about that, but they are often also about what the thing awakens.

A child crying in public can stir something very old. It reminds us of need. It reminds us that human beings begin in helplessness. It reminds us that none of us arrived as calm, self-contained, reasonable adults. We were all once carried. We all once cried without explanation. We all once needed someone else to bear us before we could bear ourselves.

This may be moving. It may also be unbearable.

Some people had childhoods where their own need was not welcomed. Some were shamed for being too much. Some were told, directly or indirectly, that distress was an inconvenience. Some had parents who were frightening, absent, depressed, overwhelmed or easily angered. For those adults, the sound of a crying child may not simply be annoying. It may touch something more painful. It may stir resentment towards the child who is allowed to be held, soothed, excused or understood.

There may be envy there too.

Envy is not always obvious. It does not always feel like envy. Sometimes it feels like irritation, judgement or contempt. Children have something adults have lost. They have time ahead of them. Their bodies are still growing. Their futures, at least in fantasy, remain open. They are closer to beginnings.

To be around children is, in some small way, to be reminded that we are ageing.

This can be tender, but it can also be painful. The child in the seat behind us may carry more meaning than they know. They may remind us of our own children, wanted or unwanted. They may remind us of children we could not have, children who grew up, children who left, or the child we once were and perhaps cannot easily remember with kindness.

There is also guilt.

Children represent the future, and the future is not an easy subject now. They will inherit what adults leave. Climate anxiety, economic pressure, housing problems, overstretched schools, digital saturation, loneliness, social division and a public world that often feels harsher than it should.

It is difficult to look at children and not, somewhere, know that they are being handed a complicated world.

Guilt is not always felt as guilt. Sometimes it is pushed outward. The child becomes the problem. The parent becomes the problem. The family on the plane becomes the problem. It is easier to say, “Why are they allowed here?” than to sit with a harder question: “What kind of world are we leaving for them?”

I am not suggesting that every irritated passenger is secretly thinking about climate collapse or intergenerational guilt. Human beings are not that tidy. But collectively, the resentment of children may carry something of this. They ask something of us, and perhaps we already know we have not given enough.

There is another psychoanalytic idea that may have some place here, though it needs using carefully. Freud’s idea of the death drive is often debated and easily overused. But one way of thinking about it is as a pull away from aliveness, disturbance and growth, towards stillness, control, repetition and a kind of deadened peace.

Children are not peaceful in that sense. They are full of life. They spill life everywhere. They ask questions, move their bodies, cry, laugh too loudly, interrupt, want, need, protest and grow. They disturb the adult fantasy that the world can be made smooth and quiet if only everyone behaves.

Some of the hatred directed at children can sound like a wish to silence life itself. Not just to reduce noise, but to remove need. To make public space cleaner, calmer, more controlled, less dependent, less messy.

But a world without children in public is not a more mature world. It may simply be a more defended one.

We should also be careful about what we think we are seeing when a child appears to behave badly. Not every child who struggles in public is being badly parented. Some children are autistic. Some have ADHD. Some have sensory processing difficulties, learning disabilities, anxiety, trauma histories, communication difficulties or medical conditions that are not visible. Some are simply having an ordinary developmental collapse in an unusually demanding environment.

And some parents are doing far more than strangers can see.

A child having a meltdown in a supermarket or airport may not need a public verdict. The parent may not need another stare. They may need space, patience, or simply the absence of contempt.

This is particularly important when we think about less abled children and families. Many people like the idea of inclusion until inclusion becomes inconvenient. We support difference in principle, but not always in practice. We are comfortable with disability awareness when it comes as a poster, a ribbon, or a training session. We are less comfortable when it appears as noise, repetition, delay, distress, movement or behaviour that breaks the smoothness of adult routines.

But real inclusion is not always quiet.

Sometimes it asks us to tolerate being disturbed.

That does not mean everyone must be endlessly patient in every situation. People have limits. Some adults are struggling too. A person with trauma, sensory sensitivity, chronic pain, grief, anxiety or exhaustion may genuinely find a child’s distress overwhelming. Compassion for children should not mean indifference to adults.

The question is whether we can hold more than one reality at once.

The child may be overwhelmed.

The parent may be ashamed.

The passenger nearby may be at the end of their tether.

The situation may be difficult for everyone.

Psychologically, this is a more mature position than simply finding someone to hate.

In online psychotherapy, we often become interested in the speed of judgement. The mind sometimes attacks before it thinks. It turns discomfort into certainty. “That child is spoiled.” “That parent is useless.” “People like that shouldn’t travel.” These conclusions may bring a momentary sense of superiority, but they do not help us understand much.

A more reflective question might be: why has this affected me so strongly?

That does not excuse the behaviour. It simply opens the possibility that my reaction may contain something about me as well as something about the child.

Perhaps I am tired.

Perhaps I feel trapped.

Perhaps I was never allowed to be difficult.

Perhaps I feel my own life has become too full of responsibility and too short on freedom.

Perhaps the child’s noise touches my own unspoken distress.

Perhaps I am angry at need itself.

These are uncomfortable thoughts, but they may be more useful than contempt.

There is a wider cultural issue here too. We seem increasingly unsure how to live alongside inconvenience. We want frictionless services, quiet consumption, personalised environments, controlled experiences and the ability to curate what reaches us. Public life does not work like that. Other people interrupt us. Their bodies, needs, disabilities, children, grief, confusion and distress enter the same spaces we occupy.

The question is not whether this is always pleasant. It is not.

The question is what kind of people we become when we meet it.

Children in public test the emotional health of adult society. They reveal whether we can tolerate dependence, immaturity and difference without immediately turning punitive. They reveal whether we can remember that development takes time. They reveal whether we have any patience left for those who cannot yet manage themselves.

And perhaps they reveal how we feel about the vulnerable parts of ourselves.

Because the child we reject outside us may have some relation to the child we reject within us. The noisy child, the needy child, the frightened child, the inconvenient child, the child who wanted too much.

We were all young once. We were all disruptive before we were considerate. We all needed patience before we could offer it.

This does not mean children should rule every space. It does not mean adults do not deserve quiet. It does not mean parents should never be challenged. But it does mean that hatred of children should concern us.

A society that can only tolerate children when they are silent has lost something important.

It has lost contact with development.

It has lost patience with dependence.

It has lost memory of its own beginnings.

And perhaps, most painfully, it has lost some hope in the future.

Children are not always easy to be around. They are not meant to be. They are unfinished human beings, learning how to live among other unfinished human beings. Sometimes they cry on planes. Sometimes they kick seats. Sometimes they ask more of us than we feel able to give.

But before we join the next online chorus calling for them to be removed, we might pause.

We might ask what is really being disturbed.

The flight? The meal? The quiet?

Or something older, more vulnerable, and much harder to admit?

For some people, this kind of reaction may connect with earlier experiences of shame, trauma, grief, family difficulty or feeling unwanted. I, Alan Archibald, offer a space to think about these reactions more deeply, not to judge them, but to understand what they may be carrying.

If this article has touched on something familiar, you may also find it helpful to read more about trauma therapy online, grief therapy online, intercultural psychotherapy, or online psychodynamic psychotherapy across the UK.

Feel free to head over to my contact page or online booking page to secure a free 20 minute consult if you would like to talk more about what I can offer.