Children welcome – as long as they stay quiet: Is Lithuania becoming less child-friendly?

In Lithuania, children are widely seen as essential to a woman’s fulfilment and a successful marriage or partnership. Yet parents raising children often encounter a less welcoming reality, from being told not to bring children to weddings to having to breastfeed babies in airport toilets.

Some everyday conflicts have little to do with a lack of public services and more to do with other people’s unwillingness to accommodate the needs of families with children.

A mother may be allowed to keep flowers in her apartment building’s stairwell but forbidden to leave a child’s bicycle there, even when it does not obstruct passage. Parents may also feel unwelcome at cultural events not specifically designed for children or face criticism when a child cries in a public place.

Whether such attitudes are widespread in Lithuania is difficult to establish because research into society’s acceptance of children and families in everyday public life is lacking. But researchers say the gap between the importance people attach to children in principle and their willingness to accommodate them in practice deserves closer attention.

“There is a lot of talk in the public sphere about declining birth rates and the need to encourage families to have children, but we much less often consider how willing we ourselves are to accept children and their parents with understanding in everyday life,” said Aida Savicka, a senior researcher at the Lithuanian Institute for Culture Research.

Parents can feel isolated

Giedrė Juškienė, founder and head of the nonprofit organisation Namų mama (House Mum), said it was difficult to generalise about Lithuanian society’s attitude toward children and families because experiences varied. Still, she said, parents were not always made to feel welcome.

Juškienė said some parents were afraid to visit certain places because they expected to be unwelcome, adding that support from the surrounding community was essential to preventing isolation.

She described a dispute with neighbours in her apartment building over whether she could leave her children’s bicycles on the second floor, despite there being enough space for people to pass. Flowers were allowed in the stairwell, but the bicycles were not.

“Someone’s need to grow flowers is accommodated, but a mother’s need to shorten the distance she has to carry a bicycle is not,” Juškienė said.

She also described pressure to clean the building’s stairwell, even though there was no established cleaning arrangement and other residents did not do the work.

“There is this attitude that a mother with children can do the cleaning, while older people find it difficult,” she said.

Her experiences abroad were mixed. During the approximately five years she lived in Germany, she received support when her child had an unexpected public tantrum. But she also encountered people who demanded that children be silenced when they cried outdoors in a park.

Juškienė said parents needed to strike a balance between allowing children to learn how to behave in different settings and recognising that children could not always be expected to sit quietly or remain calm.

“I am one of those mothers who takes her daughters to many places, even if it requires more effort,” she said. “Sometimes, though, you have to leave because a child cannot sit still, and you cannot force them to.”

Children excluded from weddings and workplaces

Gediminas Karoblis, dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Vytautas Magnus University, has raised eight children with his wife, Gitana, and now has six grandchildren. Having spent 15 years in Norway with his family, he said he had observed changes in attitudes toward children and families in Lithuania.

One trend that particularly concerned him was the growing practice of asking wedding guests to attend without children.

Karoblis said such requests put families in a difficult position, forcing them to find someone to look after their children so they could attend an event traditionally associated with family life and new beginnings.

“It is as if the emphasis is on making sure children are absent, that nobody should see they exist at all,” he said.

He also questioned why mothers sometimes had to breastfeed babies in toilets while airports provided elaborate smoking rooms with comfortable seating.

“Changing a baby in a toilet is one thing, but breastfeeding there is another,” Karoblis said.

He said the same lack of accommodation could be seen in workplaces, where parents taking time off to care for sick children might be accused of failing to manage their personal lives.

Even when a child’s illness is a legitimate reason for absence, parents can be told to find a babysitter or otherwise ensure that childcare does not interfere with work, he said.

Karoblis argued that children were often welcomed when they appeared happy and well-behaved but were treated as an inconvenience when they cried, made noise or disrupted adult routines.

“People are delighted when a family with children is 100 metres away, walking nicely and smiling with balloons,” he said. “But that changes in more difficult, less picture-perfect situations.”

A gap between values and everyday life

Research suggests that Lithuanians continue to place considerable value on children as a source of emotional bonds and meaning in family life. But Savicka said positive views about children did not necessarily translate into a willingness to accommodate them in public.

In a recent monograph, Generations of Change in Lithuania: A Perspective on Changing Values, co-authored with Rūta Žiliukaitė and based on European Values Study data from 1990 to 2017, Savicka found that traditional views of children as important to women’s fulfilment and successful marriages remained strong.

Younger generations, however, were more likely to emphasise individual choice and less likely to regard having children as essential to a fulfilling life.

The research did not directly examine how children and their families are treated in public spaces. Savicka said further studies were needed to establish whether everyday interactions reflected a broader social distance toward children.

She noted that people might support government assistance for families in principle but react differently when a colleague needs a flexible work schedule or time off during school holidays, requiring others to adjust.

One indication of children’s experiences comes from a 2024 survey conducted by the organisation Save the Children Lithuania. Only 58% of respondents ages 14 to 18 said they felt able to be themselves in public spaces. Savicka cautioned that the survey was not designed to provide a comprehensive assessment of society’s attitudes toward children and families.

Financial support is not enough

Lithuania is increasingly becoming a country of one-child families, with households raising one child accounting for the majority of families with minor children, according to Savicka. Researchers have also found that the number of children people say they want is generally higher than the number they actually have.

That gap suggests some families may not fulfil their plans because of real or perceived obstacles, rather than a lack of desire to have more children, she said.

Financial incentives alone are unlikely to resolve the problem. Access to affordable, high-quality early childhood education, the quality of the education system, flexible working arrangements and affordable housing all influence whether people feel able to raise children.

The distribution of support also matters, as families’ access to services varies depending on where they live, their income and their employment circumstances.

Savicka said high expectations of responsible parenting could also discourage people from having more children. Parents are expected to invest substantial amounts of time, attention, emotion and money in each child. When women carry most of the burden of childcare and household responsibilities, another child can mean significant restrictions on their professional and personal lives.

At the same time, Western societies have increasingly embraced child-centred parenting, placing greater emphasis on children’s emotional well-being and individual needs. But that trend does not necessarily mean the wider public has become more accommodating toward children.

“This is where the fundamental contradiction emerges: within families, children increasingly become the centre of attention and care, while outside the family they are often expected to be as inconspicuous as possible and not disturb adults,” Savicka said.

“Parents are expected to meet ever-higher standards in responding to their children’s needs, while society itself is not always prepared to take on even part of the responsibility for creating an environment that is welcoming to children.”