'My kids are not an inconvenience': mum hits back at kid-shaming

Jess Marie has enough of people giving her family the side-eye in public. She's a mother to four and blogger, who has encountered kid-shaming on more than one occasion. 

Recently they moved to a new area, where they encountered an elderly neighbour. 

"She looked at me in shock (almost horror) when I told her that we have four kids and she kept saying, 'Four? Four??' Then she looked at me square in the eyes. 'I guess that will be okay,' she said, 'as long as they are quiet.' She was dead serious.

"I laughed like it was a joke (because that’s what I do when I feel awkward)." 

Often, she feels that the size of her family disrupts other childless people around them. 

"However, I often feel like we bother people by being us. Not necessarily by anything we do, but just the idea of what we 'might do'. When we’d wait our turn for our passports and tickets to be checked at the airport, we’d hear heavy sighs behind us like, gawd are you kidding me. I felt like turning around and saying, 'FYI sir, we paid for six tickets, you paid for one, so we have every right to be here.'"

But kids are a fact of life, so families shouldn't be made feel uncomfortable by bringing them out in public. 

"Kids are a normal part of society; it’s always been that way. You are not actually entitled to a child-free life. Sorry, not sorry." 

While there a multitude of adult-only places and things to do, kids have the same right as any of us to shops, parks, transport, restaurants etc. 

As long as parents teach their kids how to properly behave in public, Jess says that we shouldn't shame them for just being kids. 

"We teach our kids to respect people and to not act like wild animals (except the four-year-old, she’s kind of a loose cannon). We teach them to give up their seats on a train for an elderly person and to look someone in the eyes when they shake their hand. We teach them not to wrestle or yell in inappropriate places and to say please and thank you. They aren’t perfect at it by any means, but they’re pretty damn good.

"Outside of that, I will not apologise for having kids, and I won’t apologise for my kids being…kids." 

So she won't apologise for them doing normal 'kid things' in public. "They are kids. Kids are a normal part of life." 

And as a normal part fo life, they should be embraced. 

We need each other.

"We need the grandmas and the grandpas and we need the babies and the obnoxious four year olds and everyone in between…like it or not." 

What do you think mums? Have you ever been kid-shamed?