A Woman Got Hate For Having Her Baby At The Bar. But It Illustrates A Larger Issue For Parents.

A viral video resurfaced this week, leading many citizens of the internet to ask the brave question: Should children be seen or heard in public?

Reposted to X, the video (which was previously shared by both the New York Post and featured on A&E’s “Customer Wars” in 2024) featured a woman confronting another group of patrons for having a baby with them, insisting that they were “idiots” for being there at a bar/restaurant in Austin, Texas.

The baby, who seemed to have started to fuss a little (not a total meltdown yet, if you’re familiar with babies and their powerhouse lungs) and the group stated they were waiting to pay their bill and leave. The woman, however, continued to call them names and insult them.

“You guys are idiots,” the woman said repeatedly. “Get your fucking kid out of the bar. You have a baby in a bar.”

While the friends of the parent, onlookers and eventually some helpful staff helped neutralize the situation (and, notably, they were all fine with having the baby there to dine), this video has inspired plenty of discourse over who exactly was in the wrong here.

“They’re both wrong. You shouldn’t have a baby in a bar,” one commenter on X replied, “but if you’re going to address it this is the wrong way to do it.”

“People with babies are allowed to go out,” another added. “When the baby started crying, that’s the cue to leave. It was NOT the cue for that Karen to put her drunk ass in the middle of it.”

Other commenters noted that there are plenty of hybrid restaurant/bar/pub locations around the U.S. — and there’s nothing all that sinister about sitting down to eat a burger or wings with your family at those kind of establishments.

“My favorite place is a bar in my small town. If I want to bring my kids to have a pizza and wings in low light comfy leather booth, fuck off,” another commenter wrote. “When they have a meltdown I’ll work on fixing it but food needs to be settled, the bill needs to be settled. I’m not throwing away a $60 table order because your ears are offended at the sound of new life learning this world.”

There are adults-only spaces in this world — they’re a necessity and an important thing to have — and most establishments have clear rules about if, when and where it’s safe or appropriate for kids to be there. Outside of that, children laughing, crying or showing signs of life isn’t an inherent violation of your rights nor your vibes.

However, there is some evidence of a hostility toward sharing these common spaces with children. A 2022 survey from hiijunior found that 55% of Americans reported being “bothered” by children in restaurants — with 62% saying they’d rather have a pet seated near them than a child.

Given the perpetual rehashing of this “should kids be in [insert public space]?” discourse, it’s easy to see the stigma parents encounter just by existing in shared spaces. From the parents who preempt their flights with goodie bags, apologizing in advance for any noises or child-like behavior that might follow, to the deep anxiety that their kid will be the one “misbehaving” in public, it’s not hard to see how this shame keeps many parents from engaging with their friends and communities. (Plus, there’s the reality that getting anywhere with small children is hard enough and often involves a lot of logistical planning, gear, deal-making and cat-herding — and that’s without a random hater slurring insults your way.)

Kate Gawlik, clinical professor and family nurse practitioner at The Ohio State University, has been researching parental burnout, isolation and loneliness for years. She tells HuffPost that one thing has become abundantly clear: Getting parents out in the world and keeping them connected socially to their communities is deeply beneficial for avoiding those negative mental health outcomes.

“When it comes down to it, social connection is one of the biggest protective factors that we see for parents when it comes to things like parental burnout and parental loneliness too,” Gawlik said.

In a time with record loneliness across numerous demographics, including parents (who are already experiencing increased levels of burnout, loneliness and mental health struggles), and when there’s increased talk in mainstream politics of how “women belong in the home,” it might do more harm than good to reinforce attitudes that alienate our community members with kids.

And for those of us who are child-free, there are benefits to having a diverse community that includes our younger neighbors and their parents. There are the obvious things like fostering empathy and understanding and exposing yourself to perspectives you otherwise would’ve missed, but there are also a few less altruistic reasons too.

Embracing children in the public sphere also means that those children are exposed early on to how to actually live in a society with other people (something we kind of need right now more than ever).

When kids can learn that they are part of a community — and not the center of it — and how to engage with others (e.g. how to sit in a restaurant or ride public transportation with other people outside their immediate family), it’s priming them to be the kind of neighbors and citizens you actually want to live around in the long term. And that’s something they can’t get if they’re never given the chance to move through spaces that aren’t exclusively kid-centric.

Gawlik tells HuffPost that much of the stigma and negative attitudes toward having children in public is “culturally driven.”

Particularly “individualistic” countries — the U.S. included — are more likely to have less inclusive attitudes toward children and caregivers, she said, citing a study on global parental burnout that reached the same conclusion.

“I don’t think that you see kind of the shunning of children as much in other countries that are not considered so [individualistic],” Gawlik said. “Countries in South America, Central America, they raise families with the grandparents and the aunts and uncles. Everybody’s kind of very close proximity, so everybody’s taking turns helping with the kids. It’s just a very family-centric culture and we just don’t see that as much in the United States and Europe.”

For parents who don’t have that “village” dynamic and non-parents who aren’t involved in caring for their extended families, this can seem really foreign in action.

“A lot of us live far away from family. We are in childcare through different organizations our parents aren’t watching our kids every day. What we’re seeing as far as kids in public [and] if they’re accepted or not, a lot of it goes back to some of those things.”

Likewise, there are some other challenges in how we understand each other as parents vs. non-parents (or, parents who did their own parenting in a “children should be seen and not heard” era). Of course, to someone who isn’t in the thick of this caregiving on the day-to-day will be unaware of what normal, age-appropriate behavior from kids looks like.

“When people start to understand what’s developmentally appropriate, it’s also very helpful. Every generation maybe gets a little bit better with this,” Gawlik added. “When I had my first child and she’d have a tantrum, I’d be like ‘oh my gosh’ like it’s the reflection of me and I was so worried about what people were thinking I wasn’t a good parent because my daughter was having a tantrum on the ground over me cutting her sandwich the wrong way,”

Gawlik also said that it can be helpful for people who don’t have kids (or have very grown kids and are farther from the baby years) to give parents more grace and to try to understand the very real ways their lives have changed since becoming parents.

In the same vein, she said parents can help them understand their experiences by “inviting them into their world… and letting them see those hardships that come along with being a parent.” While that can be vulnerable and a little scary, it can help those parents maintain those connections from their lives before.

On the individual level, these are just first steps to igniting a “cultural shift” that can bring together groups of people who share the same spaces, according to Gawlik. But they can be assisted by organizations, businesses and those designing our public spaces taking time to consider families and children from the start — from spaces for changing tables, pumping or other accessible accommodations that can support parents in our communities.

“The main messaging should really be that parents don’t need to be afraid of bullies like [the woman in the video],” Gawlik said. “You can see how somebody in the video intervened and I would say, nine times out of 10, you’re going to have more of the people that are going to be accepting and non-judgmental than you are of the ones that will be — and you shouldn’t alter your life or change your life to accommodate those people.”

Because, ultimately, to say children don’t belong in restaurants, planes, stores or the occasional workplaces reaffirms the idea that the only public places these members of our community belong are library reading hours and mommy-and-me classes. (And that would be a devastating loss for us all.)

But, maybe, there’s an opportunity to ask ourselves what a deeply inclusive society that holds space for children — as well as the adults who love them —could look like.