Kids belong in public spaces

Yes, even airplanes.

I’m sitting on a plane right now. At the beginning of a long flight.

To my left, across the aisle and just ahead is a mother holding a baby. He is right in my eye line. And he has looked back at me a few times.

He’s truly adorable. His eyes are sparkling. His cheeks are plump. A lock of his hair is curling outward over his big bubble head. He’s maybe five months old and he could be the Gerber baby. I catch his eye and smile and wave. He stares, and responds, the way babies and small children do instinctively to faces.

I remember holding a baby on a flight like this. I remember how hard it was. And I also miss it. If I could, and she wanted to me to, I’d try to help that mom. That is my instinct now with moms and babies.

My own kids couldn’t come on this trip. I honestly don’t fly with them very much. They are eight and 10 now, the ages where they wouldn’t be too much of a hassle on a flight, although this is a long one. Who knows, it might get intense for them. Even for me, I’m flying to Hawaii, this is a pretty intense travel day.

While I waited at the gate in Chicago, I was going through replies to a Substack note I’d written about flying with kids. What I had said — controversially, apparently — was I didn’t care if people were bothered by a crying baby on a flight or a child kicking the back of their seat (I was responding to some jerk was complaining about that online, as is a recurring thing).

I said I cared that a grandmother got to meet her grandchild. I cared that a parent got to take their kid to the beach. I said that our values in society were unbelievably messed up that so many people thought the idea of being disturbed by a child on a flight was so upsetting, and not the possibility that other people would lose those important moments that make life worth living (if the children could not fly). A lot of people agreed with what I said it seemed.

But also there were a lot of people that kind of flooded my mentions with replies, some of them a little nasty. One person called me a bad mom. It’s crazy how casually people dash off that kind of insult at strangers now. Someone had done it the week before as well. They had misunderstood something I said. At the time I read this insult, ironically, I was in the process of ferrying my son to a birthday party. We had stopped at Target on the way to pick out a gift. A $25 Rubik’s Cube — a favorite for one of his best friends. Where does that impulse some to insult mothers so casually? I think it’s a very ugly thing.

Maybe I am being nostalgic but I remember when it seemed like being kind and generous to kids in public was sort of a common value. One of my theories, is that parents today aren’t given the respect they used to in the past. They are “infantilized.” Everyone is invited to police the job they’re doing, without offering any help. It’s kind of cruel routine I think. That is what I was responding to when I jotted off those notes.

I remember when my son, my first born, was very young, he was adorable just like that baby today. Just an extremely cute baby, with a big mop of hair right from birth. He was charming and he seemed to know it. I would take him on the bus, for example, and he’d start kind of flirting with the people behind him. And they would often interact with him. And say he was cute and I would be just bursting with pride. I thought he was destined to become a politician. They way he turned a trusting face outward and spread love and brought it in.

Like I said my kids don’t fly very much. I do remember one time flying with my kids and one of the kicked the seat in front of them. His little legs, they were just hanging there. He was full of energy. He was behaving like a child. The person in front of me was grouchy about it. And I tried to get him to stop. But the level of control you have over a child, these people, it’s funny to me how far they imagine that goes.

One of these reply guys said it is “extremely entitled” not to care if your child disturbed someone, kicked someone’s seat. There were a lot of comments like that. People feel so strongly about this, I feel like there is something bigger going on. I honestly don’t think I’d care or remember all that much if a kid kicked my seat. It just doesn’t seem like too big a deal to me. That baby I flew with today was a perfect passenger. But what I have learned about kids in my 10+ years as a mom, is they have their good moments and bad moments. Just like adults, they can be jerks.

One thing I said on Substack Notes was that I felt like it was fine not to want to have kids. But it is bad to feel victimized by the mere presence of children. It was funny, a lot of these responses I got about kids kicking a plane seat, they were pretty melodramatic, I thought. They used the same kind of tone to recount these stories as if they were recounting a memory from the front lines of combat.

Parents these days are too permissive, a lot of people said. Of course, there is a trend toward permissive parenting, I will grant that. I also think everyone is sort of insane now. That includes many parents and many non parents, for what it’s worth. We’ve forgotten how to be together in public and get along.

That is a product of the pandemic I think. But children were most profoundly affected by that. My oldest missed a year of school. Sports were cancelled. In Cleveland, they even closed playgrounds, took down swings, until long after pro sports and the kinds of things that were important to adults had resumed. Many, many children suffered huge setbacks in their social emotional development over that time.

Another thing I said on Substack, was that I think people who aren’t parents overestimate the importance of parenting and they DEFINITELY overestimate how easy it would be, if they lack direct experience. My experience with parenting is that so much is chance. You have two kids, and one is a homecoming queen and the other has social anxiety. They have their own nature and free will. Parenting matters, of course, but it feels like tinkering at the edges.

I don’t consider myself an expert parent. But I am a pretty committed one, that brings a good amount of resources to the project. I have been able to provide my kids with a good amount of stability so far. Honestly, one of the biggest challenges for me, as a parent, has just been fighting to get my kids the outside things they need to be well socialized, things like school, enough exercise, a community of children to play with.

I don’t hit my kids. Not because I am really committed to some bougie parenting style. I’ve just read that the overwhelming evidence is it harms kids. My grandparents used to beat their kids. My dad, he went to a catholic school where there were 55 kids in a classroom, he said, taught by a nun. One of his clearest memories is of that nun delivering just an ass whooping to another kid in the class, a friend of his, with a wooden stick.

I’ve never had a huge behavioral problem with my kids. I think that’s just an accident. By their nature, they are obedient, don’t like to be yelled at. They get that from their dad.

Two moms I am close with their kids have disabilities that effect their behavior. These poor moms, they are at the end of their rope. Thinking about people judging them, being mean to them, in airports and elsewhere, it kills me. Because they are very good moms in my opinion. Having a child who is on the spectrum or neuro-atypical, or that has ADD or is high-energy or whatever. People can’t imagine how difficult that is for the parents. It will only compound the family’s distress if as a result, they are isolated from public life.

The impulse to judge and condemn a person in that situation, I’ll never understand it. It think it’s not, for lack of a better term, very grown up. Before I got on the plane, I had written this Substack note, an angry one, that I didn’t get to post before I boarded the plane. And what I said is, I know how hard it is to fly with kids. And I’ll always sympathize with the mom. This mom ahead of me, she is flying the whole trip with that baby in her lap. The idea that she’s getting away with something.

There seems to be a growing impatience. Rather than a failure on the part of parents, I think it reflects the increasing separation of adults and children into separate spheres, which is something I am writing about in the book I am working on. Many people aren’t exposed to children that often. They don’t know how to separate normal childish behavior from something abhorrent. I think this impulse toward exclusion is harming children, harming all of us.