When Walt Disney designed Disneyland he did with the intent to make it a place that was fun for the whole family. He didn’t want Mom and Dad on the sidelines while only the kids had fun. He certainly succeeded, today the much-mocked concept of the Disney Adult (somebody who has fun at Disneyland or Walt Disney World with or without kids) has become a well-known phenomenon. But it appears that maybe it’s getting out of hand.
Going to Disney Parks with kids is certainly one way to have fun. Going without kids is also perfectly acceptable. However, it appears that there is not an insignificant portion of adults who go to Disney Parks with kids and then leave them behind to do adult stuff alone, and now I don’t even know what to think.
A recent post on the r/Disneyland subreddit was supposed to be about an annoying fire alarm that went off at 6:30 in the morning, but it quickly developed into a discussion of parents who leave their kids in hotel rooms while they go off and do other things. Apparently, one commenter’s last time at the same hotel also involved being awoken by loud noises, but this time it was a screaming child.
Last time I stayed there, a fire alarm wasn’t needed. There was an absolutely SCREAMING child in the room next to us, and we eventually had to go to the front desk because it JUST. WOULDN’T. STOP. SCREAMING! Turns out, the parents LEFT the screaming kid in the room to go down and have breakfast.
If this was a one-off situation where one set of parents made a really bad decision, that would be one thing. But apparently this happens way more often than you might think. Several others commented experiencing similar situations, including one who said a kid was left alone in a room not simply for breakfast but all day while the parents hit the parks…
This happened to me at Animal Kingdom Lodge at Walt Disney World. The people next to us left their kid in the room to go to the parks all day and the kid cried non-stop.
The exact age of the kids in these stories is uknown, but clearly, if the kid’s response to being left alone is to scream, then they are too young to be left alone. For the record, the age that Disneyland and Walt Disney World consider acceptable for a kid to be alone inside the parks is 14. Clearly, these kids were younger than that.
I’m a parent of young kids, but before that, I was exactly the childless Disney Adult that so many people seem to hate. My wife and I loved hitting the parks together and having the freedom to do what we wanted, something we simply don’t have now. So I get the desire to leave the kids behind, but, I mean, that’s just not an option.
There used to be places at Disney Parks where, for a fee, kids could be left for a few hours while adults went to dinner or otherwise had fun. They closed with the pandemic and may never reopen, which is too bad, but there are babysitting services in the area that can be hired. There are ways to handle this situation that don’t involve leaving kids screaming in hotel rooms.