I’ve pretty much accepted that if I sit in the back of any church for Sunday Mass or any afternoon/ evening Mass, there are going to be kids from toddler age up to about age 7 doing acrobatics on the pews, running, banging stuff around and making inappropriate noise. These days, when every other kid has a diagnosis of some condition that affects their attention span or keeps them from sitting still, on top of general poor parenting, I just offer it up. It doesn’t seem like many churches even contain them in a cry room. I’d personally love it if they were confined to one room where they could go nuts without bothering others, but most churches don’t even seem to have them.
I note that this is not all kids and that many families who come to church have relatively well behaved children, nor do I expect kids to be sitting absolutely still in the pew or perfectly quiet at all times (I was a kid once, I know what it’s like to have to sit through what seems like an interminably long one-hour Mass) but when a kid is running up and down the aisles for many minutes at a time, banging his toys on the pew, or climbing on the pew like it’s a jungle gym and running and jumping down the length of the pew seat stepping on other people’s personal items, it’s left the bounds of “squirmy kid” and entered crazy time.
