James' World 2

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A man on a plane TikTok’ed about getting a refund after a baby in a nearby aisle cried for 45 minutes. That man was a dick. A few years back, a lady on a South Korea–to–US flight gave out handwritten notes and care packages—earplugs, gum, candies—to atone for flying with a baby who might cry. That woman was a benevolent fool.

I can’t get my head around either of those standards—neither the “I’m sorry I cannot control the behavior of this defenseless human in my arms” position, nor this new “Why has this baby ruined my day?” schtick.

It’s the season of mass travel, December being the month we have to touch base with uncles, aunts, grandparents, and even MAGA-hatted distant cousins, lest we summon bad tidings and bah-humbugs—especially when a newborn’s involved. This time of year, it’s your duty as a parent to serve up your baby, oft dressed in velvet and doily, to cooing relations.

I am a loud person by nature—God blessed me with a voice that carries—but the thought of negatively impacting someone else’s experience with my presence is, by no stretch of the imagination, mortifying. I don’t talk during the movie or use speakerphone for public calls. But I have no qualms about my daughter’s lack of absolute silence in any situation. I’m sure you can Labrador-train a child to be seen and not heard, but a new-ish-born baby is a lasso of foghorns you can’t predict the trigger for, and parenting toddlers, on the whole, is fighting for your fucking life—every minute trying to swerve the carnage mainly seen in disaster movies. Many a traveling parent knows the piercing pain of their kid melting down when they should be buckling up, and shoving Cheeto after Cheeto into their mouth, or a sticky iPad into their stickier hands, to ease the onset of Armageddon. You’ve heard the verging-on-shrill pitch to their voice, the rising panic as their mile-high cub breaks the sound barrier.

To state the blindingly obvious: Babies cry. Without vocab or motor skills, a baby can’t indicate even the smallest discomfort without Niagara-ing into their bibs. If a baby is wet, they cry. If a baby is tired, they cry. If a baby is hungry, they cry. A baby can cry at the scratchy label in a onesie, a slight gust of cold air, the 12-second gap between Ms. Rachel videos. A baby’s Spotify Wrapped is just the sound of them wailing at different pitches.

And it should go without saying that a baby crying isn’t a reflection on the parent or their parenting style. Happy, non-future-serial-killer babies cry. Well-watered, well-tended babies cry. A baby that doesn’t cry may seem aspirational for Christmas travel, but it’s more likely an issue for a medic.

I’m wondering what brings people online to bemoan babies crying on flights. Were they expecting to be shielded from the general public when they purchased their ticket for public travel? Were they hoping to pay for extra soundproofing along with their legroom? There’s something about the echo chamber of social media that has siloed us into hyper-individuals, fixated not only on our personal experience but on the things that threaten it. Rather than co-exist, we have refused to become comfortable with the uncomfortable.

The public-shaming aspect, especially of mothers, carries a certain subtext; it’s about a woman failing to disappear into the passing montage of a man’s day—about making herself known to him without courting his attention. There’s a sense that a woman is meant to carry out her job as a mother in perfect silence, like a fresco of the Madonna and child.

But the people judging babies that cry seem to forget that they were once babies that cried. And in a way, the complainers are still the babies—unable to modify their own emotions, to empathize, to rationalize. Where a baby lacks the development to properly express themselves, the complainers lack the maturity to shut up and noise-cancel. Instead of acting out, what they really need to do is grow up.

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Collage by Vogue; Photo: Getty Images

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