“How did we get here?”
A free play centre has been forced to close due to the recent behaviour of inconsiderate parents.
The Little Northerners venue, in the Great Northern Warehouse in Manchester city centre, offers a sandpit and indoor play area for pre-schoolers, is open seven days a week.
But its owners have announced they are having to temporarily close their doors due to parents not supervising their children and ‘scrolling through their phones’.
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They said adults taking their little ones have been failing to clean up, breaking toys and property and leaving food behind which is a ‘choking hazard’.
They said the recent success and posts on social media, which has seen attendance at the centre double, there has been a ‘rapid deterioration’ in how the space is being used, with a number of safety incidents reported.
In a post on social media, Haylea Osborne wrote: “After much thought and consideration, I have made the difficult decision to temporarily close Little Northerners PlaySpace without notice.
“Our Mantra of ‘No Prams, No Food, No Shoes’ and ‘A Tidy Space is a Safe Space’ along with the support of our fabulous regular families has carried us through delivering a consistently safe space for the last three years.
“Despite the best efforts from myself, the fabulous site team (who reset the space daily) and my assistant who visits the space twice weekly to carry out safety checks, we have observed a rapid deterioration in how the space is being used.
“Since some significant social media coverage at the start of the year, our visitor numbers have doubled. During the same period the number of choke hazards we remove from the space weekly has doubled as has the number of broken toys.
“In the last five months we have had more reportable safety incidents than we had in the previous two years put together.
“In the background I have been working on what we could do address this without aliening our regular families who live in the city who rely on the space and help us care for it.
“However, when I received pictures from the assistant, I was left with no choice but to act upon it.
“How did we get here? Quite frankly…. grown ups allowing their children to play in a way that is inappropriate and unsupervised, this laziness and disregard for the Little People who use Little Northerners has resulted in the space being unsafe.”
Speaking to the M.E.N, Haylea added: “Parents are feeding their kids inside the space when there is a picnic area outside and leaving food behind. This is a space designed for 0 – 5-year-olds. That age child should be supervised and encouraged to play in a certain way.
“Broken toys and furniture indicates they have been left to their own devices probably whilst parents scroll through their phones. We also have empty baskets to encourage the children to tidy up after themselves.
“The space has run as an unmanned space for over two years with no issues. I suspect that this is one or two parents spoiling it for the majority. They are quite possibly passers by rather than the loyal families who live in the city and rely on the space sometimes daily.”
The business said they will be ‘rethinking’ the concept of the space as they apologised to parents and carers who regularly attend.
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