Has your baby or toddler ever been pushed in a play area? Or had a toy snatched right out of their tiny hands by a kid twice their size?
Mine has. And that's exactly why Naru has two separate play areas.
Cast your mind back to our first journal post — the one where I talked about visiting a play café for the first time, when Jordan was seven months old. I walked in and thought, where has this been all my life.
But here's the part I didn't go into detail about.
Jordan was tiny. Still figuring out how to sit up properly, still very much in the "everything is overwhelming" phase. And in that play café, the space wasn't separated by age. So you had babies and toddlers all the way up to older kids — maybe four, five, six years old — all in the same area.
Those bigger kids weren't doing anything wrong. They were just being kids. Running fast, stomping hard, screaming at a frequency I'm fairly certain only dogs can fully hear. And honestly — some of them were running a little wild too, because their parents were finally, finally, getting their five minutes of peace. Which, no judgement, I completely understand. But next to a seven-month-old? It was a lot.
Toys got snatched right out of Jordan's hands. Not maliciously — just because a three-year-old saw something shiny and went for it. And once or twice, he got bumped by a kid who genuinely had no idea there was a baby in their path.
I wasn't angry. But I was stressed. And I could see Jordan was, too.
That experience stayed with me. So when Nana and I started planning Naru, separating the play areas was one of the first things we agreed on.
So here's how we set it up.
Our smaller area is for three and below. Soft play, a mini ball pit, pretend-play corners. Low to the ground, gentle on the senses, designed for kids who are still very much in the "wobbly and figuring it all out" stage.
(And yes — we know babies love a ball pit just as much as anyone. So we made sure they get their own one too. Two play areas, two ball pits. We don't do things by halves.)
Our bigger area is for three to twelve — a proper slide structure, a full-sized ball pit, more room to just go wild.
And between them? A divider.
Which — and I say this with full love — bigger kids treat as a personal challenge approximately three to four times a week. The number of times we've watched a five-year-old casually attempt to scale or vault over it… let's just say our hearts have aged faster than the rest of us.
Parents tend to fall into two camps.
Parents of babies and young toddlers get it immediately. Almost every time, someone will say "oh, thank goodness" — because they've been to other places and felt that same stress I felt with Jordan. They didn't have to explain it to me. I already knew.
But parents of older kids? A few have pushed back a little. Their child has to physically walk (or sometimes — run) from one area to the other if they want to use both. And yes, that does take an extra minute.
Honestly? That's kind of the point.
We didn't plan this as a design flaw. We didn't plan it as an inconvenience either. But looking back, I think there's something quietly nice about a child having to pause, walk, and choose — rather than just bouncing between everything all at once.
We want them to slow down. Even just for a minute.
Because they grow up fast enough as it is.
Ru
Co-founder, Naru Play Café