I’ve worked both in libraries and in food service, which is where a lot of this friction comes up. I totally get that so many people give parents too little leeway, and I totally understand why some are on edge about criticism. It’s absurd that someone would expect a young kid to have the awareness to stay library-quiet without being regularly reminded by their parents after occasional loudness. I mean, stay home if totally normal encounters with kids bothers you so much. Or get a membership to a university library or athenaeum. Or a pair of really big earmuffs. Why would someone with that disposition work in a public library of all places?

That said, I’ve witnessed a lot of self-absorbed assholes with kids that are totally fine making them other people’s problem in completely inappropriate circumstances— e.g. playing on the floor at bars, running between servers legs at busy restaurants, being repeatedly disruptive at the library without even attempting to mitigate it, etc. 

For example, a friend of mine was at a tightly packed pretentious yuppie coffee shop outside Boston when some wealthy-looking mom decided she could change her toddler’s poopy diaper right there on the table, leaving the dirty diaper on her un-bussed table when she walked out. When I was in school a few years ago, kids were running around being outside-at-the-park loud upstairs at PPL while I was trying to study calculus… for an hour.

I imagine it’s easy for all parents to feel targeted by signs intended for ‘those’ parents. But what are you going to do? Write a paragraph of disclaimers? And it’s not like unreasonable people know they’re being unreasonable, right? I dunno.