with a runner-up of "well if all you librarians who hate kids so much are against these spaces why do they seem to exist in a few libraries? Might you be suggesting no one listens to librarians? That obviously can't be true, why look at me here, not listening to you."

The amount of people saying things like this directly to youth librarians. The AUDACITY.

@misskubelik People might (and already do) do that, but it’s not the actual suggestion being made and it seems super victim complexy to pretend it was

@james_dedir there are tons of people making this actual claim, please take a look and see and that is why I said RESPONSES not 'and that's what the op said!' but nice use of "victim blaming" in a totally inappropriate and not applicable context.

@misskubelik I work at a BOOKSTORE and parents leave their kids there by themselves. I can only imagine how much moreso that happens at the library.

@misskubelik We can't even get parents to have their children pick up toys/games after themselves in our early literacy area!

@misskubelik As someone with a friend who’s a librarian. This already happens. Without this play equipment. I have to assume with it, it would be 10 times worse

@misskubelik I can confirm from personal experience that people will just leave their kids at Starbucks and expect the baristas to be babysitters, let alone a library and librarians.

@misskubelik As I commented somewhere else, my upstairs apt neighbor doesn't even watch her kids in her apt or surrounding areas as evidenced by my walking out and finding 1) a kid's whole entire arm out the screen (all of which have huge holes), 2) kid opening industrial power boxes, etc...

@misskubelik It’s such bad faith arguments - if you have ever been to a park you know parents are not supervising their kids at play the way they would expect others to do. Including me. I lost my kid for 15 minutes yesterday while texting about dinner plans bc he wondered to the other side

@misskubelik I'm not even a librarian and I know that people do this just because I go to the library a lot and I've seen unattended kids, even toddlers, quite often. I can't imagine trying to deny the reality of this to actual librarians who deal with it every day.

@misskubelik It’s extra frustrating bc OP is a bike lane advocate. She clearly understands that architecture will affect/encourage certain human behavior. Adding equipment like a playground doesn’t just encourage outdoor heavy play behavior in children; it also affects parents

@misskubelik bc i’m calling the police if you are gone from them too long! last summer we had a woman’s boyfriend just drop the kids off and left! he was gone from 3hrs! 😣 the woman was out of town and he was supposed to be watching them!!!

@misskubelik We had two separate instances in the past 4 months of toddlers wandering alone on a completely different floor from a parent who was not looking for them. But it could be worse because at least they were in the building

@misskubelik I haven’t seen this mentioned but no one would expect librarians to babysit if it was a primarily male profession

@misskubelik I bet the OP and others like her would have a fit if the librarians took it as an opportunity to read banned books to the kids. 😈

@misskubelik They used to leave them in our store. We had a children’s dept, but it was mostly clothes. We tracked one down at a salon in the mall, got complaints for “humiliating her by making people think she was a bad mother. The one we called the cops for turned up just