\n<\/p>\n
Child-free resorts and adult-only hotels are discriminatory, risk creating a society of intolerance and should be banned, a French senator has said, amid a growing debate in France on whether it is inhumane to exclude children from holidays.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t organise society by separating children off from ourselves in the same way some establishments don\u2019t take dogs,\u201d said Socialist senator and former French families minister Laurence Rossignol. \u201cChildren aren\u2019t troublesome pets.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last month, the French government\u2019s high commissioner for childhood, Sarah El Ha\u00efry \u2013 who has warned that adult-only holiday resorts were \u201cnot part of [French] culture, not our philosophy and not what we want to see as the norm in our country\u201d \u2013 launched a Family Choice award as part of what she called a \u201cfight against the new no kids trend\u201d.<\/p>\n
El Ha\u00efry called for French parents to vote for their favourite child-friendly locations as a way to \u201cput children back at the heart of public space\u201d and stand up to the adults-only sector. \u201cNo way can we let it take hold in our society that children aren\u2019t welcome on a restaurant terrace,\u201d she told Parents magazine.<\/p>\n
But Rossignol said the government must go further, and called for a parliamentary debate on her proposal to make it illegal to ban children from venues in France. Rossignol said child-free spaces amounted to \u201corganising society around people\u2019s intolerance of others\u201d and served to \u201cinstitutionalise and legitimise intolerance\u201d. Rossignol said these resorts \u201callow people to say: \u2018I don\u2019t like children and I don\u2019t want to see them.\u2019 And that is not acceptable, because to not like children is to not like humanity itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Child-free resorts and hotels \u2013 often advertised with images of relaxed adults on sun-loungers undisturbed by kids shouting or dive-bombing in the pool \u2013 have expanded across the world in recent years, and businesses say demand has risen since the Covid lockdowns. For decades, hotels reserved for adults have been popular in locations such as Mexico and Central America, Thailand and Greece, attracting many northern European tourists, including Germans and Britons. South Korea has also seen a rise in child-free cafes and restaurants.<\/p>\n
<\/span>People swimming at a four-star camping site in Porticcio resort on Corsica.<\/span> Photograph: Stephan Agostini\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n But France \u2013 traditionally family-focused and with one of the highest birthrates in Europe \u2013 has instead prided itself on its family-friendly holiday attractions, from towering hotel waterslides to campsites with kids\u2019 clubs. France has relatively few adult-only hotels and resorts, estimated to account for 3\u20135% of overall tourism, far less than neighbouring Spain, a market leader.<\/p>\n As the French birthrate declines and the president, Emmanuel Macron, calls for a \u201cdemographic rearmament\u201d of pro-child policies, there is renewed debate over children\u2019s shrinking place in society. An expert report last year on reducing French children\u2019s screen-time said children must be given more alternatives to phones and take up their \u201crightful place\u201d in society, including \u201ctheir right to be noisy\u201d.<\/p>\n V\u00e9ronique Siegel, the president of the hotel section of the UMIH trade union, said child-free hotels were \u201cextremely rare\u201d in France compared with the total number of tourism businesses. She said there was a targeted market and hotels were simply meeting clients\u2019 demands. She added: \u201cFor people seeking adult destinations, if there are none left in France because we\u2019re told it\u2019s illegal, would they go to neighbouring European countries, or further afield?\u201d<\/p>\n Vincent Lagarde, an associate professor of entrepreneurship and business at the University of Limoges, who studies the business model of child-free resorts, said the top reason holidaymakers chose them was not because they hated children, but because they needed a rest.<\/p>\n Lagarde said: \u201cThere is a kind of physical and mental exhaustion in French society right now, a need to switch off from professional and family burdens. It\u2019s much more complex than simply not liking children, because my research showed that around one-third or more of these holidaymakers were exhausted parents who needed a break from their family. It wasn\u2019t that they didn\u2019t like children, they just needed a pause from the rhythm of the rest of the year. And I also observed teachers, or people who work with children. These aren\u2019t people who don\u2019t like kids, but people who need a bit of time without them.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span> Photograph: Sergey Novikov\/Alamy<\/p>\n Lagarde found the second reason people chose child-free resorts was for special time as a couple or with friends \u2013 a 2014 poll in France found that 56% of parents had gone on holiday without their children, mostly for romantic mini-breaks. Finally, there was what Lagarde called a \u201cperception of luxury\u201d associated with adults-only locations. These hotels could charge higher prices simply because there were no children making noise.<\/p>\n Lagarde said that while French anti-discrimination and trade laws were open to interpretation on the issue, no family in France had ever brought a legal complaint against a hotel for not admitting children. He said the sector was likely to continue to grow steadily in France, in the same way that child-free weddings had increased.<\/p>\n Jean-Didier Urbain, an anthropologist and author of a recent book, What Our Travels Say About Us, said: \u201cThere\u2019s a trend in society to seek more comfort and relaxation, more time to pause, and this is part of that.<\/p>\n \u201cVacations, after all, are traditionally a moment where citizens can detach themselves from their social obligations.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Child-free resorts and adult-only hotels are discriminatory, risk creating a society of intolerance and should be banned, a French senator has said, amid a growing debate in France on whether it is inhumane to exclude children from holidays. \u201cWe can\u2019t organise society by separating children off from ourselves in the same way some establishments don\u2019t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[163,634,9582,166,2918,2073,9581,9583],"class_list":{"0":"post-16182","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-ban","9":"tag-call","10":"tag-childfree","11":"tag-children","12":"tag-france","13":"tag-hotels","14":"tag-intolerant","15":"tag-resorts"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}