Soft Play Is The Worst Place On Earth

‘Soft play’ is one of those nonsensical terms I’d never encountered before having a child – like ‘wake windows’, ‘baby led weaning’ or whichever ‘leap’ my one-year-old is apparently on now.

But while my son was no more than a pea-sized foetus, I was bombarded with people talking about soft play as though it was an integral part of parenting in the modern age.

I scrolled through an endless stream of Insta-mums installing all-beige soft play areas in their massive front rooms and heard parent friends talking about hiring entire soft play assault courses for their children’s birthday parties. 

After I gave birth, other mums on my ward vowed that we absolutely must book in soft play playdates when our kids were old enough and I agreed wholeheartedly – all while making a mental note to Google what on earth soft play actually was.

Before I ever stepped foot in the world of soft play, I may not have truly known what it was, but I did know that depriving my future child of it would fall on the Terrible Parenting spectrum somewhere between feeding them Ella’s pouches and letting them watch Cocomelon.

So I patiently waited for the baby stage to turn into the jumping-off-the-sofa-and-propelling-himself-onto-the-floor stage and, when it was finally time, I did what I believed all good, caring mothers do… I took my son to soft play.

For our first trip, I was armed with a smug and content feeling in my heart and that novel I was finally going to read (the one I’d also packed in my hospital bag thinking I’d sneak in a few pages between contractions).

I even brought my laptop. This was my chance, after all, to write the next bestseller while my child cherubically slid down foam slides and played pat-a-cake with other equally polite, tiny angels. Right?

Of course, reality smacked me in the face about as fast as the stench of a hundred children’s feet did as soon as we entered the building.

I soon learned that the ‘soft’ in soft play was about the biggest misnomer known to man because there’s nothing remotely gentle about scrambling through a germ-soaked ball pit to ensure a 10-year-old the size of a grown man doesn’t belly flop onto my small child.

Visions of me sipping a flat white and leafing through a book dissipated along with the last whiff of fresh air in the place, as I realised my life for the next hour was crawling inside a massive, endless tunnel and leaping with the vigour of a goalkeeper every five minutes to make sure my son didn’t put yet another discarded plaster in his mouth.

And to top it all off, I’d paid £12 a person for the pleasure of it.

I’m ashamed to say this wasn’t my only attempt at soft play. I tried it again. And again. And again – convinced I’d got it wrong the first few times.

I left the book and laptop at home and flung visions of steaming flat whites far out of my mind. I wore tracksuit bottoms, stocked up on hand sanitiser and geared myself up for an hour of more exercise than I’d done since that PE class in Year 9.

But each time was even more borderline traumatic than the last, and eventually I had to admit to myself that there was simply nothing I’d less like to inflict upon myself during my last precious days of maternity leave than getting into passive-aggressive arguments with eight-year-olds who wanted to use the baby section to practise their especially treacherous version of parkour, picking off whatever brown sticky stains had encrusted themselves into my son’s palms or witnessing him pull a half-eaten, hair-covered thing that was once edible out of his pocket and declare “biccit!”. And no, dear reader, it wasn’t from our kitchen.

Jokes aside, my journey to rejecting the cult of soft play mirrors my journey to being kinder to myself as a mother. Society, social media, our capitalist system or whoever you want to blame, leads us to believe that to be a wonderful parent we have to do certain things – and often those things cost money.

We’re made to feel like we need certain items like organic vegetables or Scandi wardrobes or monthly subscription boxes of perfectly-curated aesthetically-pleasing toys to be the best mothers we can be.

Parks feel so very outdated when Insta-mums are telling us we must be doing baby yoga instead. 

Soft play represents all the things I thought I needed to do as a mother. Call me selfish or enlightened, but since ditching these tenner-per-hour foam dystopias for an amble through the park, picking up leaves, pointing at the birds and maybe grabbing a (free) babyccino on the way, I’m a lot happier as a mother – and both my bank balance and immune system thank me for it.