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Forget Snooty cafes with a token high chair, decaying toy box and scowls from other - most certainly childless - patrons. Kiwi cafe culture's latest craze is all about pleasing the latte set with offspring.
Purpose-built cafes existing solely for parents and children have cropped up everywhere from
Ponsonby to Papamoa over the past year.
With extras like breastfeeding booths, organic baby food, indoor playgrounds, baby massage classes and even celebrity bedtime story evenings it's no wonder parents are choosing to spend their coffee dollar at the new breed of fashionable cafe.
April Ieremia, Bernice Mene, "That Guy" Leigh Hart, and Fiona McDonald are among the celebrity parents hanging out at Bang Bang, Ponsonby's place to be seen for parents and tots.
Opened nearly a year, owner Sarah Dent has undertaken no advertising or marketing. "I just opened the door," she said.
Now she has franchise plans. "Every last detail has been designed with kids in mind. It's somewhere where parents can behave like parents and children can behave like children, where mums and dads can feel like human beings."
The brightly coloured cafe has a huge indoor playground with a chalkboard and magnetic walls, stocks new kids' books monthly, and sells organic baby food.
Tauranga's solution for parents sick of being scowled at is Koffee Kulture.
Owner Adam Long says women have been told not to breastfeed in at least two upmarket Mt Maunganui cafes.
Koffee Kulture is a "breastfeeding-friendly" environment. It has attracted support from the local council and Plunket, which distributes information about the cafe to every new mother at Tauranga Hospital.
As well as allowing mothers to feed anywhere in the cafe, it provides a breastfeeding booth, so a mother can feed baby in private and keep an eye on siblings in the play area, Long says.
The cafe also offers gluten and dairy-free options, hosts a pram walking group and holds "bouncy castle days".
In the South Island, the latest cafe craze can be seen at Scrummy Mummies, one of two parent and child cafes which have sprung up in Christchurch in just four months.
Owner Andy Hay says Plunket and other parent groups identified a lack of child-friendly cafes. He says Scrummy Mummies is a meeting place for parent and antenatal groups.
It offers storytelling, music and baby massage classes for parents and babies, sells high-end organic baby food, and provides microwaves so parents can bring their own baby food.
