Cry Room Reform?

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mrsdizzyd

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Have any of your parishes ever successfully reformed a cry room? Ours is totally unusable if your goal is to eventually teach your child how to behave in mass. There is technology galore and junk food snacks everywhere including ground into the carpet. The last time I was in there there were 3 or 4 kids playing tag and climbing all over the pews.

I feel for the parents who are obviously struggling with trying to get their kids through mass, but something has to change.

The Cry Room is obviously never going to be a quiet place. So, that is not my question. I’m more so looking for ideas/suggestions/experiences with getting parents to buy in to some level of change. Or should I just abandon hope that I might one day be able to use the cry room to soothe a crying child (or in our case hush a child who compulsively stims/babbles).
 
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Ours isn’t filled with junk food and tecgnology, but it definitely is more of a playroom than a cry room. It’s funny seeing this thread, because just this week I decided not to sit in the cry room with our 5 month old, and don’t plan to from now on. She hardly even cried even as a newborn at Mass, but used to use it just in case. Now I’m too worried about the influence the environment will have.
 
Sorry, but just out of curiosity, what does “stem” mean? I googled it and just got results for educational toys.

On a practical note, would cleaning the carpet be a good start? I think when people have a nice environment they are more likely to take care of it. If there is already junk food ground into the carpet people are probably less likely to take the trouble to keep it clean. (It also sounds gross, but I am a bit hyper-vigilant about cleanliness and hygiene!)
 
We don’t have a cry room. 100+ year old building. You can either use the Nursery in another building, staffed by professionals or carry your child out to the very tiny narthex where there are maybe 3 chairs.
 
I’ve seen one church that actually has two rooms: a cry room, which is for kids who cry and rush around, and a quiet room, for anyone of any age who needs less stimulation (the day I was there, two parents were in the quiet room with their young adult child). This particular church is quite new and very large.

As someone else said, many if not most of the older churches don’t have a cry room. Some of the newer churches don’t even have one, one being the Hispanic church where I believe they prefer to have the children be in the main worship space. They and some other churches have an unofficial section of the main church where the families with little kids usually sit. It’s like the family section, and you learn very quickly that if you sit there you will be surrounded by kids. You can also be reasonably assured that at most Masses, if you sit someplace else you won’t have young kids around you except maybe an occasional baby in grandma’s arms.
 
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We are actually planning on getting rid of our cry room. The parents don’t use it anyway and when kids are in there, they learn they can get out of Mass by acting up. Instead, we are going to focus on 1) helping parents feel less alienated when their kids make noise…it happens to all of us, 2) gently reminding the rest of the congregation that kids do make some noise, but they are the future and we should help struggle parents rather than giving them the stink eye and, 3) creating programs for kids where they can learn what Mass is all about and what to look for during Mass so that they have a point of connection.
 
do_justly_love_mercy said:
On a practical note, would cleaning the carpet be a good start? I think when people have a nice environment they are more likely to take care of it. If there is already junk food ground into the carpet people are probably less likely to take the trouble to keep it clean. (It also sounds gross, but I am a bit hyper-vigilant about cleanliness and hygiene!)
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The cleaners definitely come through there before weekend masses, but with everyone bringing their various food items into the room it gets gross quickly.
 
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When our kids made noise we’d (I) would always take them out to the vestibule. Which I guess is now called a Narthex–although the only time I’d heard that word was at a Lutheran church, but whatever… 😁…
A couple times my toddler daughter, who is now a well-adjusted high school senior, got SO LOUD that I literally took her outside. Of the building. Thank goodness the weather was nice.
 
I was told the cry room isn’t about teaching your kids how to behave. It is for calming down and emergencies and once that is accomplished go back to your pew. So in that regard a good cry room I think would have some chairs and a dedicated bathroom with a changing table but shouldn’t be set up to live in! 🙂
 
One complaint I have about cry rooms is that they tend to be in the back of church, as far away from the altar as you can get without going outside. Not conducive at all for the parent to pay attention to Mass as they care for their child.

The parish I grew up in had a cry room located just to the side of the altar…literally separated from the altar only by large windows. (You were getting a side view of the altar). I haven’t seen this in other places but having attended Mass there with my own children when they were small, it was a far better way to be able to follow Mass than by sitting in the back. The kids got a close-up view of what was going on and, I believe, this led to better behavior on their part.

This cry room didn’t have a couch or folding chairs…there were pews just like the rest of the church. A mini-chapel of sorts.
 
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I’m not a fan of the cry room…to me, it should be a place where parents are at least trying to keep the kids “quiet” but it almost always turns out to be a free for all…hard to keep my kids “quiet” when there’s a kid climbing up the wall. My kids tend to do better in the regular pews with the grandparents, aunt, uncle and the random cousin to assist.
 
Years ago when we had a young priest who really didn’t like kids, he convinced the pastor to turn the choir loft into a cry room. We had no choir at the time and it wasn’t being used except at extra seating space for really large funerals and at the earliest Mass on Christmas Eve. It was enclosed with glass, speakers and chairs added, and we waited. It was rarely used as planned and we had to keep reminding parents that they couldn’t simply send their pre-schoolers up there to play by themselves. Eventually we just locked it and it became storage space.
 
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That’s been done at the former Cathedral in my city. It always struck me as odd, to make parents carry their small children upstairs…
 
For us there was really no other space, the church was built on a slab, so no basement and no extra space. You have narthex → nave → sanctuary → sacristy. Even the choir loft is accessed from the narthex.

During a reno a few years later they had to use a built-in 3-section confessional to make a bathroom (due to the location of already existing water and sewer lines) and took space from the narthex to make a confessional that allows both face-to-face and behind the screen confession.
 
My parish cry room has actual pews and a very good view of the altar. I take my toddler to the earliest Mass time, so she is typically the only child in there. Often there are adults sitting in the cry room with no children. It used to make me uncomfortable, but then I realized it might be because of the good sound system.

@mrsdizzyd If an earlier Mass time is feasible for you, you might find the cry room empty and a usable space for worship.
 
General eastern practice, in churches with no pews, is that the little ones meander a bit between relatives, and friends.

They may not understand the liturgy, but it’s a happy time for them, and somewhere they want to be . . .

Anyway, I’ve been to RC parishes where they have some type of pre-school during mass, some even broken up by age, with an attempt to bring the older ones in for the Gospel.

There’s a lot of approaches, but it seems to me that the most successful will be those that both a) leave the child exposed to the liturgy, and b) make the liturgy desirable to the child.
 
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