Kids Encouraged
Parents are more stressed and more isolated than ever — and the free spaces that welcome families keep disappearing. So where are we actually supposed to go?
The short version
The 2024 US Surgeon General's advisory found parents are far more stressed than other adults — and lonelier, too.
In England, 429 playgrounds closed between 2012–2022; two million under-nines don't live within a 10-minute walk of one.
Meanwhile, you can now pay an airline €45 to sit away from other people's children.
We're building fewer places that welcome families and more that shut them out — which is exactly why "kids encouraged" on an event invite is quietly radical.
My co-founder Sophia emailed me the run-of-show for our salon this Sunday, and I got stuck on two words.
Not "AI." Not "trust." Not even "OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta" — though yes, we are giving up a perfectly good Sunday afternoon to the deeply relaxing question of whether we trust any of them anywhere near our families.
The two words were: kids encouraged.
Not "kids tolerated." Not "children welcome, provided they are silent, still, and ideally somewhere else." Encouraged. I read it three times, because I genuinely could not remember the last time I saw it written down and meant.
And once I'd noticed it, I couldn't un-notice everything around it.
Parental stress isn't a personal failing — it's a public health finding
Here's the thing I keep walking into, usually at 3am: parenting right now is hard in a way that isn't just my personal failing. It's measurable. In 2024, the US Surgeon General issued a formal public health advisory — the same mechanism used to warn a country about smoking, or loneliness — this time about the mental health of parents.
The numbers were bleak in a way that felt almost like relief to read, because at least they were honest. In 2023, a third of parents reported high stress in the past month, against a fifth of other adults. Nearly half — 48% — said that most days their stress was "completely overwhelming," compared with 26% of adults without children. Four in ten said that, most days, they were so stressed they couldn't function.
And then the one that actually got me: parents are lonelier than everyone else. Around 65% reported loneliness, rising to 77% among single parents.
Sit with that for a second. The people who are surrounded, at all hours, by small humans who will not leave them alone in the bathroom — are among the loneliest in the room.
Where families are actually allowed to be
So now put those tired, lonely, overwhelmed parents somewhere. Go on. Where?
Because the physical answer keeps shrinking. In England, 429 playgrounds closed between 2012 and 2022, and two million children — about a third of all under-nines — don't live within a ten-minute walk of a single one. The free, unbooked, no-minimum-spend spaces built specifically to hold children are being switched off, one council budget at a time.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, we've started building the opposite: spaces engineered to keep children out. You can now pay a European airline €45 to sit behind a literal curtain, away from other people's toddlers. (And look — some evenings, I get it. He's 4. There are flights I'd have happily paid double to sit behind that curtain myself.)
But line it all up and the pattern is hard to miss. We are more stressed and more alone than more or less any generation of parents on record. The free spaces designed to hold our kids are disappearing. And one of the quiet growth industries is selling admission to rooms without them. Then we act faintly surprised that parents feel as though they've been gently asked to step out of public life until the youngest turns 18.
So where are we supposed to go?
This isn't a rhetorical flourish. It's the actual question — and it's the reason Sophia and I built Hold My Juice.
Family life is hard enough on its own merits: the logistics, the sleep, the summer pickup schedule that changes faster than the weather. What makes it harder is a world that keeps agreeing, in a hundred tiny and deniable ways, that families belong somewhere else. Not here. Not in this restaurant, this carriage, this meeting, this conversation. Somewhere with woodchips and a fence, ideally out of earshot.
You can love your kids ferociously and still feel the walls quietly close in. Both things are true at the same time. That's not a contradiction — it's just parenthood in 2026.
Which brings me back to two words
So when Sophia writes "kids genuinely welcome — no need to keep them under control" at the bottom of an invitation to come and think hard about the future of AI, it reads, at first, like a throwaway kindness.
It isn't. It's the whole thesis.
Because the salon itself is a small experiment in exactly this. The plan for Sunday: a room full of smart people we trust, arguing in good faith about whether we actually trust any of the big AI companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, all of them — with our families. No expertise required; gut reactions are the entire point. Some post-its, some snacks, some genuinely conflicting views. We're not selling anything. Nothing anyone says gets quoted, referenced, or written up anywhere — including here.
And children are not a problem to be managed at the edges of that conversation. They're welcome in it. If your kid wanders in mid-sentence, wonderful. If you need to step out, step out. (Sophia's Rem has a well-documented pied-piper effect on the under-fives, so realistically the children will be running their own, more functional summit in the next room.)
That's the point I keep coming back to. You should not have to choose between being a person with opinions about the world and a person with a four-year-old attached to your leg. You're obviously, self-evidently allowed to be both. Bring both.
We're not asking to be let back into rooms that don't want us. We're building the room — and then leaving the door open, with a sign that says the thing almost nobody says anymore.
Kids encouraged.
If you read my last post and you're wondering whether I'm sleeping through the night yet, or whether this one was also written at 3am: no, and yes.
Frequently asked questions
Are parents really more stressed than other adults?
Yes. The 2024 US Surgeon General's advisory, Parents Under Pressure, found that in 2023, 33% of parents reported high stress in the past month versus 20% of other adults, and 48% said their stress was "completely overwhelming" most days, compared with 26% of non-parents.
Are parents lonelier than people without children?
Generally, yes. The same advisory cites research showing roughly 65% of parents — and 77% of single parents — experienced loneliness, compared with 55% of non-parents.
How many playgrounds have closed in England?
429 playgrounds closed across England between 2012 and 2022, according to the 2025 State of Play report. It also found that two million children — about 32% of under-nines — don't live within a ten-minute walk of a playground.
Can you pay to sit away from children on a flight?
On some airlines, yes. Corendon Airlines trialled an adults-only zone on its Amsterdam–Curaçao route for an extra €45 each way, becoming the first European airline to do so.
Where can parents actually go with young children?
Genuinely family-welcoming spaces — where kids are encouraged rather than merely tolerated — remain rare outside playgrounds. That gap is exactly what Hold My Juice exists to close.
Sources
Parental stress and loneliness: U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory, Parents Under Pressure (2024). Read it here.
Playground closures:State of Play, Raising the Nation Play Commission (2025). Reported here.
Child-free flight zones:Business Traveller (2023). Read it here.
