Babies have shown up at tennis games and concerts. Where's the line on bad parenting these days?

In the third set at the recent U.S. Open, on her way to losing against the world number one, British tennis player Emma Raducanu finally said something.

“It’s been like ten minutes,” she complained to the umpire, gesturing to the crying baby in the crowd who was distracting her during her serve.

“It’s a child. Do you want me to send a child out of the stadium?” the umpire said. It was plainly a rhetorical question. But then spectators yelled out “Yes!” and Raducanu smiled and gestured as if to say, “Well, yeah.”

By taking this stand, Raducanu risked making herself into a viral villain, a young Karen in tennis shoes. But she was saved because so many people agreed with her.

The ump was right though. You can’t eject a baby. So the game went on, as did the crying. Raising the same issue in a talk show rant the other day, the English sports commentator Simon Jordan suggested parents who bring their babies to sporting events are irresponsible “morons.”

He said this view does not make him a “horrid” Dickensian caricature who hates babies. “The fact of the matter is it’s not appropriate. It’s not mean spirited.”

There are diverse attitudes to babies in public spaces, and many efforts to formulate the rules for manners and etiquette without annoying anyone too much.

But exasperated intolerance is maybe the most common one, as is the suggestion of hard and fast rules against babies in public spaces not meant for them. No babies in restaurants. No babies in first class. Babies at the theatre, are you kidding?

It’s hardly a new notion. There is, for example, the prim Emily Post, whose great-granddaughter-in-law continues her tradition and wrote in an updated version of the original 1922 Emily Post’s Etiquette that children “can scarcely be too young to be taught the rudiments of good manners, nor can the teaching be too patiently or too conscientiously carried out…. All youngsters must be taught from their earliest years that there are certain rules that have to be obeyed and certain manners that always must be practiced.”

Likewise, the acerbic Miss Manners, in a 2020 volume of manners, noted “a certain lack of civility in the society.”

“This is not entirely new,” wrote Judith Martin under the pseudonym. “It is some decades since the enlightened child-rearing technique, or lack of one, has consisted of ‘Just be yourself, and don’t care what other people think.’ The intention may be to say, ‘Stand up for what you know is right, even in the face of disapproval.’ But it comes across as ‘Do what suits you and never mind how it affects anyone else.'”

It continues today, but in a new social media environment. Once, a manners scold would simply scold, maybe tut tut or mutter under their breath, and that would be that. Now, though, social conflicts have a tendency to go viral, and suddenly everyone has a chance to react. Suddenly it’s less about the specific annoyance and more about the general policy.

Two recent examples from the news illustrate the issue from opposite angles.

On the one hand, taking babies into grown up spaces can upset the baby, even plausibly harm it. That was what the Colombian rapper Maluma thought when he saw a baby at his concert in Mexico City. “I’d like to know what he’s doing here. Next time protect his ears or something.” He chided the mother for “swaying him as if he were a toy.” Never mind the viral exposure of a concert to an infant’s immune system, he was worried about the kid’s eardrums.

On the other hand, taking babies into grown up spaces can annoy and upset everyone else. That was what seemed to happen at the U.S. Open.

Rebecca Eckler thinks people are unfair to parents who take their babies out in public. She’s mindful of the etiquette, and once tipped 40 per cent when her baby cried at a restaurant. But she would “rather hear a baby scream than an adult telling me about another fad cleanse they are on.”

“People love to clutch their pearls like it’s the end of civilization when they hear or see babies and toddlers. I never judge,” said Eckler, a former star National Post columnist in its early days; author of books including Knocked Up: Confessions of a Hip Mother-to-Be (2004), Wiped! Life with a Pint-Sized Dictator, (2007), and The Mommy Mob: Inside the Outrageous World of Mommy Blogging (2014); and publisher of RE:BOOKS, a publishing house of books for and by women, and Rivkah Books, its Jewish imprint.

“Flying is already a misery, tiny seats, someone always reclining into your lap, someone snoring, someone who coughs. Maybe flying with a baby was literally unavoidable to a family. If you’re lucky enough to have a life where the worst thing that happens to you is that a baby cried while you’re sipping mediocre coffee on a plane? Well, congratulations! A crying baby at a concert? What about every adult recording the entire thing holding up their phones or worse, holding their iPads? Should we arrest them? Restaurants? Same thing. Maybe that couple hasn’t seen each other outside of sweatpants and Goldfish crackers in months,” Eckler said. “And honestly, the idea that a baby should never inconvenience adults is nothing short of laughable. Life is one big inconvenience.”

There was a time maybe a decade ago when there was a broad societal effort to make public spaces more welcoming to new parents. Public places installed nursing rooms and quiet areas, more washrooms got change tables, there were magazine thinkpieces on breastfeeding in public, emphasizing that women should be not just free and unbothered, but actively helped and encouraged to take the baby into public places.

That messaging continues, because companies seem pretty slow to pick up on it. Just this week, Virgin Australia apologized for asking a woman to stop pumping and to leave a lounge at Melbourne airport, leading an MP to scold the airline. In New Jersey, a department store apologized for not letting a woman breastfeed in a fitting room.

Elaine Swann is an etiquette expert in Los Angeles and author of a forthcoming manual on modern etiquette. Her view is that manners are, at root, about putting others at ease. It’s not so much about rules and policies. It’s being “mindful of the environment” and how they might be affecting it, she said in an interview.

Many of the troublesome examples arise from people who are annoyed by babies, but should really just mind their own business and deal with it. But other examples reveal a crude overconfidence in parents about the behaviour of their child, an inflated sense of how cute their baby seems to other adults.

At worst, this is an entitled sanctimony that verges on rude cluelessness. Swann, for example, worked for many years in airline cabin crews in first class, and recalls one parent seeming so besotted with their little child as it went up and down the aisles, visiting people who were paying handsomely for a luxury experience, and arguably spoiling it.

“It’s a blindness on the part of the parent,” she said. “Not everyone wants to be visited,” and it forces people to be gracious to this baby even though they may be unwilling.

So what that squinty-eyed view of babies in public boils down to is this. It’s not that you shouldn’t bring your baby to this public event because it’s wrong in principle to bring babies to public events.

It’s a more subtle point. You shouldn’t bring your baby to this public event because you are being annoying, right here and now, just you, specifically you. And let’s be clear. No one can blame the baby. The parent is the annoyance. This is not the time to share your views on child development theory, knowing that social media will back you up. These are beside the point. Junior’s being a pest, which at least for the time being means you’re being a pest.

Voicing this opinion, however, that babies do not belong in first class cabins or in nice grown up cocktail lounges and similar fancy places, tends to get Swann roasted on social media. It’s a common attitude, but one that people love denouncing.

“I said what I said. And I stand by that,” Swann said.

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