Macchiato at Enokissa (Yamanashi, JP)
Mill Hill Children’s Centre, Waterlooville, Hants (UK) has taken the unusual step of banning parents from drinking tea and coffee while they play with their children – at the center’s coffee mornings.
The reason, center administrators think that drinking scalding beverages around toddlers amounts to an unacceptable risk – said beverages will now have to be room-temperature or cooler in order to be enjoyed in the presence of the center’s children.
Center coordinator Penny Bovey explained the facility’s position:
We feel this is a sensible way of keeping children safe. Groups are only run for approximately one and a half hours and cold drinks are available. Groups where children are not mobile or in a creche will still be able to have hot drinks.
Twenty-nine-year-old mother Karen Griffin expressed her exasperation:
I think it’s absurd. A lot of us mums enjoy a gossip over a cup of coffee. It just won’t be the same.
Look, I am all for providing children with a safe environment. We don’t want them running on the street or getting into cars with strangers – but somewhere along the way you have to draw a line (not necessarily in the sand) about acceptable levels of danger. If you eliminate all of the risks from childhood you don’t really prepare children for life in the real world – or worse, you you end up with a population of risk-adverse killjoys determined to suck all of the fun out of life for the next generation; either way it is lose-lose. [Metro; Image]
I don’t mean to get all emotional but coffee is something that I take very, very seriously.
I get it. I use to work as a preschool teacher and we were not aloud to have coffee at all. Lets face it, kids are accident prone, the more children there are arround you the more high risk it is. I think its perfectly acceptable to avoid an unneccessary accident. The parents arent going to die without their coffee.