One Family Statement | Retailers need to consider one-parent families in their planning for safe shop opening.
One Family requests that all retailers – hardware shops as well as food retailers consider the needs of one-parent families in their planning for safe shop opening.
We appreciate that shops need to manage customer volume and behaviours so as to keep their staff and all customers safe. We believe however that it is not, necessary to ban or restrict the number of children and young people from shops to do this.
We are deeply concerned that some retailers continue to ignore the advice of the Department of Taoiseach to “…use a common-sense approach” and to ban children.
We ask that retailers note that for some families including those parenting alone or partners of frontline and essential workers must visit shops with their children, or indeed young people may have the responsibility for shopping in a particular family.
It may be more appropriate for shops to ask two-parent families only to visit with one parent and no children and to understand that some lone parents may have two children whom they need to bring shopping with them. We believe that in order to move to a situation that is safe for everyone we need to have all parents only bring children with them to shops when they have to, and we ask two-parent families to support us all in this.
We greatly appreciate the hard work that retail staff, many who are parenting alone too, have been undertaking during this crisis for all of us.
Thank you.
Karen Kiernan
CEO One Family.
