“Shhh, be quiet, she’s trying to do work,” a mom said to her preschooler, a few feet away from me. I glanced up from my laptop and winced, realizing I was the “she” the mom was referring to.

I sighed. I didn’t want to undermine her, but neither did I actually want her kid to be quiet. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I specifically came to our city’s town square to get away from the oppressive quiet of my house. For me, working from home can lead to some intense cabin fever. So I biked over to watch the variety of people wandering in and out of stores, hear the kids squealing in joy, and feel the breeze on my face. My work requires a lot of intense thought and having slight distractions give my brain a break.

But I mostly felt sad because our city’s square is a public space made for everyone – including kids. It’s a pedestrianized area with restaurants and stores on both sides. It hosts a beautiful two-story library with all sorts of important public services, from free masks to citizenship services to well, books. Colorful picnic tables that provide outside seating to restaurants march up the middle of a street that’s been closed off to cars since the beginning of COVID. A stage hosts bands on Friday nights, with Baby Boomers and little kids dancing along. An area in the middle covered with fake grass and adorned with large rocks always has little ones running around. The chairs and tables surrounding the grass seat adults working on laptops, reading books, or just chilling. In the summer, a play fountain is in front of the stage, with kids in bathing suits dashing between the streams of water shooting upward. In the winter, the area with the fake grass and fountain gets transformed into an ice skating rink.

Unfortunately, our society has separated kids out from adults in so many ways. Many places designed “for” kids are considered inappropriate for adults to be. Parks are often seen only as places for kids. When you make kid-specific spaces “more fun for adults,” it’s typically by adding wine in a space where parents sit and look on. Besides the very questionable implication that parents can only deal with being there with wine, it’s still separating spaces as being “for kids and their parents” and “everyone else.” Many of these spaces are also limited by economic class, as the indoor play spaces are usually quite expensive.

On the flip side, this attitude makes everywhere else default designed for adults alone. It separates families with young kids out from everyone else, making it harder to maintain friendships with people without kids and intensifying the isolation of those early years. It means that normal kid behavior that’s developmentally appropriate is not tolerated outside of “kid spaces.” I’m not saying that kids should run wild everywhere. But there needs to be places kids can run wild that aren’t kids-only.

That’s why we need places like our town square. Places where kids can mix with people of a variety of ages, economic status, backgrounds and more. People working and not working, people there with kids and not, people buying things from stores and people there because it’s a free space open to all. All sorts of people. And kids need to be welcome – not just tolerated – in those places, in all of their wonderful and sometimes frustrating kid-ness.

I wish I could have told that mom that day, “Don’t worry about it! I love that your kids are here and it’s totally understandable that they’re making noise. They’re kids! That’s what they do.” Even though I didn’t, that’s a message that both parents and the people who design our cities and public spaces need to hear more often.