In my experience, Readercon is the only convention that has this specific sort of policy in place. All the other cons I've attended neither actively discourage nor actively encourage teens from going/to come.

Having been to several as a teen, I'd say they're not too teen-friendly, either. There are typically very few teens & a subtle but still present shunning.

Good to know it's the only one that actively does this ... the thought of that as a trend was disturbing!

And I'm sure there were reasons that seemed to make sense at the time, but--sheesh. There's got to be a better way to accomplish whatever this was really meant to accomplish. (Because I assume alienation wasn't the actual goal, even if I can't imagine it isn't the effect.)

I think at Westercon maybe it was an under-12 policy? That seems a little more reasonable, especially since it didn't seem to be strictly enforced for slightly younger kids who were more or less acting responsibly.

I sorta love you. Yes. And well said here: "We're a genre made up of people who either were all generally once bright, precocious, passionate, intelligent teenagers. As such, we should truly know better--we should remember better--and should have a lot more respect for those who are there now."

And the people who organize these things are the people who complain that fandom is dying because it doesn't have enough young blood. Wonder why...

I wouldn't go to that con. I wouldn't even think about it.

And the people who organize these things are the people who complain that fandom is dying because it doesn't have enough young blood. Wonder why...

That. Exactly that.

Goodness, One of my most treasured memories as a writer is the first local con I went to not knowing ANYTHING about what submitting manuscripts meant and what to do or expect, and having several much older writers take me under their wings and shepherd me through the experience. I was all of 14 at the time and learned so much, I remember someone loaned me a book on norse runes that I never found them to return.

As a mom I know there seems to be hostility at times towards children in different groups, so if you're not especially into going alone and leaving the rest of the family looking at the walls, you drop out to find things you can do as a family.

(And this is not opening the can of worms as to behavior good or bad or people behaving without common sense or good manners)

Just a generalization...It seems to many kids are now an intrusion rather than a teaching opportunity.

The division of the world into "entirely-kid-centered" and "no-kids-allowed" places feels like part of the problem. I think we need more places where kids can just be part of the larger scene, neither the center of attention nor excluded ... and of course, we also need to remember that kids and teens are not the same, and that there's a vast difference between an 8 year old and a 14 year old ... amazing how often that gets forgotten.

My guess would be that someone's liability insurance prompted the decision.

Probably, which is part of the larger problem of 16 year olds being treated like little kids for "liability" reasons.

And yet ... other cons have managed not to institute such rules so far.

And then there are anime cons, which are mostly unattended teens under 18 (at least the one we went to), and they manage somehow, too ...

I guess I feel like treating 16-year-olds like human beings is important enough an issue that one should try to find a way around the issue, even if it means seeking out another hotel.

I was wondering if it was a hotel liability issue.

I understand the swimming pool, in case of rough-housing and/or injury. But most places make the cutoff 15 or 16 to be unaccompanied.

Part of the problem at Readercon I saw in action a couple of years ago . . . there was a parent who dumped her kids at the con and did not supervise them the entire weekend. They roamed the halls all night, grabbed food where they could, and rowdied at the pool. So rules were instituted.

So for one parent's bad behavior rules were instituted? I have problems with that, too ... (Also, how old were these kids? A 17-year-old wandering the halls doesn't trouble me. An 8-year-old does.)

Assuming this parent did have teens (because otherwise, why would the con set the definition of "child" at "under 15"?), well--if an adult rowdies at the pool, we just tell them to stop or make them leave the area. Unless there was a huge group of teens doing this at once ... is there some reason the same couldn't have been done there? Apply the same policies as to any misbehaving person in that area?

I might even be okay with requiring a parent's phone number be on file somewhere, maybe, but getting rid of all the other policies, or making them 12-and-under policies. It's how old the bar is set that's much of the problem.

I guess I'm having trouble seeing why, when teens are able to roam and enjoy other cons, at this con it's somehow problematic ... enough so to have a policy that's so deeply unwelcoming.

Hmm. Possibly there were incidents that elicted the policy. There are some choice stories about out-of-control children at conventions whose parents were not concerned about their offspring climbing up artshow hangings, running up to the front of the room and jumping on the table the panelists were sitting at, and running around barging into people ("the imp from hell" was how one person who likes children and professionally often was dealing with groups of young children, put it). There are also the cases of "free range children" dropped off at a convention in the morning and running loose without adult supervision, who are not well-behaved. Yes, those are extreme cases, but they do happen--and one of the causes of That Infamous Boskone Letter from long ago, involved "ratpacks" of wandering not-sober teenagers at 2 or 3 AM looking for parties who weren't necessarily even members of the convention (see "Dripclave" for how in the case of Disclave, literal hangers-on completely killed off a convention, as opposed got booted by the hotel and declined to do business with by anyone else within 30 miles--Boskone found a new venue, which could fit at most half the people in 1988, as were at the convention in 1987. There is NO elegant way to say, "more than half of you have to go away." There is also no elegant and mollifyin way to say, "drunken teenagers interested in parties and not science fiction and fantasy books, crashing the convention were key elements in the hotel kicking the convention out." Another factor is that minor children occupy a peculiar place in Massachusetts law, as regards liability and such--they're minors and therefore a protected generally class. If something bad happens, no matter how badly the minor child was acting, the blame and responsibility and sanction goes on adults.

The liability laws etc. are such that apparently Readercon decided to implement the policy it implemented. trifle and skyfyre are among the people who've grown up having gone to Readercon and other conventions with their parents when they were minor children--I wonder what their take on the situation might be.

It stinks that things happen, that cause an apparent need for such policies--hotel security is an impartial third party, and so are the police. Dealing with minors, again, has nasty legal liability issues--ones which have been around a number of years now, and are the reason why professional conferences tend to have lower age limits of "No one under 18 admitted" -- that has the irony that there have been teenagers who had their own businesses, who couldn't go to trade shows in the market segments the businesses they headed up were in!

Alas, I suspect it's a case of the irresponsible and destructive, contributed majorly to wrecking things for everyone else of their age cohort.

But, see, if a 35-year-old acted badly--or even if a pack of 35-year-olds acted badly--we wouldn't dream of banning all 30-somethings from a con. I know there's liability ... but other cons do find ways around this.

There are some choice stories about out-of-control children at conventions whose parents were not concerned about their offspring climbing up artshow hangings, running up to the front of the room and jumping on the table the panelists were sitting at, and running around barging into people ("the imp from hell" was how one person who likes children and professionally often was dealing with groups of young children, put it).

And that sounds like kids much younger than teen age, there.

As for problems of teen drunkenness, well, I have no problem with enforcing the drinking age. (Which I personally think should be 18 instead of 21, but that's a whole other issue.)

And absolutely, kick out or discipline anyone who's behaving disruptively, whatever their age. No problem with that, either.

I hear liability cited a lot as a reason for bad treatment of teens, not just at cons. Yet other cons do somehow manage ... and I guess I'm just getting tired of hearing that used as an excuse. I guess to me, the issue of treating teens like human beings -- making them part of our society, and not shuffling them out of the way until they're 18 (when magically everything changes and they're supposed to just know how to integrate into the society they've been kept from) is important enough an issue that people ought to be more creative about finding workarounds.

If there were liability issues around any group besides children (say, if a hotel didn't want people with certain medical conditions on account of liability) we'd find a way around it, somehow. Personally, I think we need to do so here, too.

Thank you, sartorias. As I recall, this rule was reluctantly instituted after some rampaging kids had nearly knocked over a disabled guest and a complaint was brought.

Nine

Yes--among other things. Many other things.

As a parent of a fannish now eighteen-year-old who's been going to lots of random cons with me over the last ten years, I have never seen anything like this. At the Glasgow Worldcon, he had a special lanyard saying he was under 16 and therefore entitled to go into the under 16s area. At Ad Astra he had his badge stamped "DO NOT SERVE". (He looked at this and sighed. "Damn, and I was hoping to pick up a few minions this weekend." "They're on to you!" "Guess they are.") Other than that I don't think there's been anything.

And I totally agree with what you say in this post. My fandom values people of all ages who have interesting things to say.

I've never been to Readercon, as it's at an awkward time of year for me. I'm feeling less sorry about this.

At Ad Astra he had his badge stamped "DO NOT SERVE". (He looked at this and sighed. "Damn, and I was hoping to pick up a few minions this weekend." "They're on to you!" "Guess they are.")

This just made me smile. :-)

Bogglement.

Right there boggling with you.

I'm here now at least in part because no one gave me difficulty, even at 14-15, about mingling freely with the adults at the few cons I attended (or for that matter online on places like Genie). I can't begin to imagine how off-putting such treatment would have been.

Also, it seems to me that teens often live down to expectations. If you're constantly told that your judgment, tastes, and behavior do nt fit you for adult company, where is the motivation to behave in ways that do?

Incidentally, I owe you email, now that I'm back from Poland and have two brain cells to rub together. Many apologies!

Because children are another species and need to be isolated from all adult human endeavors, right!

*sigh*

*shakes head*

And then at 18 they need to automatically and instinctively integrate themselves perfectly into the world they've been isolated from, too!

The scuttlebutt at-con (relayed to a parent in front of me) was that the restrictive rules were in place but almost never enforced. Which a teen looking at the website would never know.

(Of course, the real problem is that the con is literally stranded, with basically no walking access to anything and minimal public transit. So a teen who doesn't have a car, and doesn't have a parent/family friend to drive them to meals, would be -- well, I certainly wouldn't have felt safe asking for rides or going out to dinner with older strangers at age 16.)

Yeah, since I found out about this from a group of teens talking about cons and why they're sometimes uncomfortable about same, it's not at all clear ... and if you have to know that ahead of time, from someone who already knows the con, doesn't that discourage new blood regardless?

Well thought and well said. I don't know anything about specific cons one way or another, and since I haven't been to Readercon I don't know what its reasons might be for their policy.

Seems to me like the best thing is to offer the kind of programming that attracts the kind of attendees you want, and let them self-identify. A con may not see itself as interesting to teens--but why not let the teens decide? If a concom thinks kid-friendly means having a video room and gaming, it's not taking into account the diversity of kids.

And it's worth remembering that John M. Ford sold his first short story to Analog at age 17...

Wow, it's AgeFail 2009!

Brings back memories. Fifteen, twenty years ago I organized some panels on age discrimination in fandom. At the time, of course, I was one of the kids at the con -- just old enough that they couldn't keep me from doing grown-up stuff, but young enough to get a lot of the "damn kids" treatment. At our local con, MileHiCon, the panel was a productive discussion. At WorldCon ... not so much.

MHC, after a long graying period (when I first started going, sometime around age eight, I was one of the youngest people at the con ... and twenty-five years later, I still was) has managed to start getting more teenagers in. This warms my soul. I'm not sure what we're doing right, but I have the gloomy impression that whatever it is, it's pretty rare.

One of the founding members of the committee was 17. Of course, he's now in his 30s. And two more committee members have run a daycare, others have kids, et cetera.

There's also a Lawyer on the committee, I wonder if that has anything to do with the way this policy comes across....

Update: I have looked into the restrictions on children and teens at Readercon. They did not arise from the concom, but from hotel policy: as a condition for hosting the rest of us. Needless to say, this rots. As I understand it, the committee is now looking into other hotels.

Nine

Indeed--very glad to hear this is a hotel issue and not a committee issue, and that the committee is looking at alternatives! Thanks for the update!

Why would they do this? What on earth can the rationalization be?

Turns out it's a hotel thing, and that they are looking for a new hotel.

That's just embarrassing. I remember when I was a kid, I got into collector dolls-- I still have a set of dolls I bought back in the 80's-- and I wanted to join one of the Collector Doll societies, and I couldn't because I was too young. No junior membership, no nothing. Door firmly shut. I've wondered sometimes if I'd be more of a collector today if back in the day, the organization had let me in.

(Here from karenhealey.)

I was very glad to find out (after I'd finished ranting!) that apparently the policy is a hotel issue, not a concom one--and a new hotel is being sought out.

Since they are looking for a new hotel (instead of just saying they have no choice and letting things stand), I'm feeling a bit better about the whole business ...