If you read the past blog entries on patron rights and responsibilities and the associated rights and responsibilities for employees, especially if you have experience as a children’s or youth librarian, they may have left you wondering “but what about children in the library?” As someone who spent years of her career as a children’s librarian, I felt that children’s behavior and safety warranted its very own blog post. My philosophy on this takes several prongs, but focuses, much like collection development, on the responsibility of the adult that accompanies or is otherwise responsible for the child(ren). Let me walk you through what I mean.
Children’s Inclusion in Patron Rights and Responsibilities
Every patron who walks into the library should be subject to your Patron Rights and Responsibilities (or whatever you choose to name that particular behavior policy). This should be regardless of age. Some may argue that very young children are not cognitively equipped to understand the requirements placed upon them when they are in the library. This is where the responsible person accompanying the child needs to assert those responsibilities. Presumably, someone who is capable enough to accompany a younger patron into the library should also be capable of understanding the rules that surround the use of the library and either explaining them to the child or ensuring that the child acts accordingly.
In addition, aside from perhaps the littlest of our patrons, children are out there in the world and understand and mimic a lot in their worlds. So, if the grownups are behaving appropriately, the kiddos are likely to follow suit. You can also help guide the younger patrons to understanding appropriate behavior with a sign explaining the most important rules with simple, direct phrasing and accompanying graphics or icons to illustrate what you expect. For example:
In this library, we:
- Use our walking feet
- Use our indoor voices
- Clean up after ourselves
- Ask for help when we need it
Using icons that illustrate the rules can help children who aren’t reading yet to still understand the rules. Plus, children who go to pre-k or elementary schools will likely be familiar with similar signs in their classrooms.
Speaking of signage, it can also be helpful to the adults who bring children into the library’s space to have clear signage clarifying their role and the role of library staff. You will know the best way to present this information to your community but something to the effect of “Please remember that the library is a public space. We do our best to keep all of our patrons safe, but library staff members are not a substitute for childcare and cannot supervise children,” could be helpful in keeping expectations clear and preventing some confrontations between patrons and staff.
Child Safety Policy
If you have a space that’s dedicated to children’s usage, you probably want to have a policy dedicated to this, or, at the very least, a section in your patron behavior policy that addresses children who are unattended. Some things to consider when you’re crafting a policy around child safety include:
- Will you be able to indemnify the library from responsibility for children left in the library unattended?
- How will you communicate the role of the caregiver in determining their child’s ability to use the library with or without supervision?
- How will you define an “unattended child”?
- What situations will prompt you/your staff to act in the best interest of the library and the child to resolve a problematic situation.
Once you have those situations outlined and defined, the next step you may want to consider is outlining what will happen if you become concerned about an unattended child. This may seem to cross the line into procedure, so this is entirely up to you whether to get into this level of detail. However, it may be helpful for your staff to have precisely what to do enshrined in policy. That way, if there are any challenges or questions as to how the situation was handled, your staff are enabled to say, “here is a copy of our policy; this child met the circumstances defining an unattended child and we acted as our policy outlined.”
Here are some questions you may want to consider when deciding what you will do if you find that a child meets your definition of unattended and is in a situation that you have defined as warranting action:
- At what point(s) do you attempt to contact the child’s caregiver and how many times will you make those attempts?
- What will you do if the child is unattended, and it is close to closing time?
- What will you do if you are unable to reach a caregiver?
- Will you consider contacting the police? At what point should that action be taken?
- What are the limitations on your staff?
- ex: staff will never transport a child to their home or lead a child outside the building
- What do you do in the event of a medical emergency?
- What steps will you take after the situation has been resolved (I’m a big fan of incident reports and may do a future post with that focus)
Role of the Caregiver
By and large when you see a caregiver at the library, they are already aware of and enacting their full responsibilities on behalf of their child(ren). Here are some questions you may want to consider if you choose to craft a section that creates clear expectations about the responsibilities of the caregiver:
- If a caregiver chooses to drop off their child(ren), when is the latest they must pick up their child(ren)? —-> Relatedly, will the caregiver need a reminder that library hours vary, and it is the caregiver who must know when the library closes?
- How will you express the boundaries a caregiver should set with their child(ren) about what they see, read, hear and borrow from your library?
Some additional considerations:
- Will you mention or include an ALA statement about the right for all to have equal opportunity to access anything in the library?
- Does your library have filtering software on any of its technology and what are those limitations (or not)?
- Do you want to address the privacy rights of a child who may have their own library card?
The Role of Library Staff
I have spent most of this post focusing on the responsibility of the person accompanying any children into the library, but the needs and responsibilities of staff members should be addressed as well. Staff members have job duties they need to attend to, and their responsibility lies in taking care of their job duties, which does not involve childcare. However, library employees still have the responsibility to maintain a safe, accessible space for as many patrons as possible. They need to be trained and prepared to intervene when the occasion calls for it. If you’ve hired a staff member to work in a children’s or youth department, you’ve likely done so with the trust in their temperament and ability to handle your youngest patrons with care and respect.
They are also out there in your community, communicating with your patrons and likely have a very good sense of how to approach patrons and keep their departments as safe as possible. That doesn’t mean they won’t occasionally need backup or training but having a policy that reiterates the responsibility of the person who is there with the child as paramount can go a long way to helping your staff feel more confident when they do need to say to a child “where is your grownup?” or “doing that isn’t safe; please stop.” It also empowers them to find that grownup and explain the policies in a way that not only can help the caregiver understand them, but also that the caregiver is the one who needs to take the reigns in the situation.
Like so many policies, whether or not you address these specific issues and, if you do, whether or not it becomes its own policy or is embedded in other policies is largely dependent upon your unique library situation. You know your library community best and whether or not these situations apply to your library. You know what is practical for your staff and makes the most sense in the context of your library. I hope these points give you the option to consider what will work best within your library’s structure and your community’s expectations.