The Crying Baby in the Room

By now, many people have seen the video of Trump yelling at a baby and its mother at one his campaign stops. At first he seems to welcome the baby and acknowledges the mother’s efforts to stop the baby from crying, but later he asks the mother to take the baby out and indicates that he was joking about welcoming a crying baby who is disrupting his talk.

As a mother who also has faced rooms where she was not sure whether her crying (or even just happily noisy) baby was welcome or at other times specifically told to remove her baby, I’d like to call attention to a larger issue beyond whether Trump doesn’t like babies. Do we want to be a society that not only values parenting, but also one that embraces the act of parenting?

To simply value parenting, all we need to do is what politicians regularly do already: talk about the importance of family. We can have television shows that feature all kinds of families and have lots of consumer products at the ready to make parenting easier. Yet, the act of parenting is different because that is when moms (and dads) are seen visibly interacting with, engaging, or disciplining their children.

This is not to say that the news media never cover act of parenting moments. Jet Blue produced a commercial, for Mother’s Day of course, about an airline crew encouraging passengers to smile at a baby because everyone would get a percentage off their next flight every time a baby cries. Every once in a while, I see a warm-hearted news story about a professor holding a baby during class for a student. I find the professor story particularly funny, as it’s a male professor holding the baby for a woman. As a female professor who once brought my baby to class, I can assure you that many people did not find the experience heartwarming. In fact, after that one time, I went out of my way to make my husband take any and all future babies of ours to work during necessary times. I did this because, in my experience, people tend to perceive men taking infants to work as sweet and helpful but women taking babies to work as being completely unable to balance their work and family life.

While we can find heartwarming images of people trying to help parents integrate their children into the world, in the United States, I would say it’s something that parents have had to work hard to do. I think of the big fight in Brooklyn over bringing babies to bars. I think of how a homeless mother’s life might have changed if she could have just been allowed to bring her kids to her job interview rather than leaving them in car, and then getting arrested for it.  My own town has recently been involved in a discussion over whether in it is inappropriate for the owners of a nail salon to have their toddler in the store during the day.

Trump’s baby story and these other minor discussions over the do’s and don’ts of parenting acts distract from some larger ideas. Do we want to be a society that not only encourages people (some people, at least, but that’s another blog) to have children, but also makes it possible for them to engage in public acts of parenting? Looking at other countries shows us that it is possible to change our economic policies and our attitudes about why we feel the need to hide our acts of parenting or protect the public from seeing them. Right now the baby in the room is what everyone thinks they are talking about, but the discussion we should be having is how work, play, family, and life should intersect.