Well perhaps said toddler already slipped the host\ess a fifty to be seated well away from you
I disagree that crying babies need to be taken off of buses. Restaurants, yes; movies, of course, but buses, just live with it. Older children, certainly.
I also agree that we’re likely hard-wired to find babies’s crying disturbing in order to do something about it. Those babies who cried in a soft pop song never got feed and their DNA weren’t passed along,
When my wife and I were out when our children were babies, I got the task of quieting them, or at least look quite busy attempting to quiet them since I’d always get sympathetic looks rather than the daggers my wife would be on the receiving end of.
Well maybe they have a ticket which allows them to travel only on that one particular service, or maybe they have to be on that service to make a connecting train/bus/plane, or maybe they have to be on that service to make a vital appointment, or maybe they don’t want to get off because it’s pissing with rain and freezing cold outside, or maybe it’s the last service, or maybe the next stops are in less than salubrious areas, or maybe any number of reasons why they decide to remain on the service which they’ve paid for, and are as equally entitled to be on as you are.
Hey, here’s a thought, next time you’re on public transport with a crying child, why don’t you get off at the next stop and wait for a bus/train with a collection of passengers which more suits your delicate sensibilities?
Do you have any idea how complicated it is to live with small children? No, you can’t always plan ahead and make sure the child is in a perfect mood on the train. Any maybe you actually have to get somewhere – yes, I’d like to get to town in time to attend my aunt’s funeral, thanks, and no I can’t just get off this bus right now.
(That was a real situation, I traveled with a nursing baby to my great-aunt’s funeral on a bus. It wasn’t super fun for anyone, although the baby didn’t cry very much.)
I dislike being near crying babies as much as anyone, and a lot more than most people. But it’s a part of life. You deal with it as gracefully as you can.
I flashed on it with the topic line.
It was…memorable.
My husband can juggle. More than once his doing so in front of crying toddlers or noisy preschoolers has quieted them. I remember one mother exclaiming, “An angel walks among us!”
Obviously, this doesn’t work every time and not everyone can juggle.
Sorry, please enlighten me…
Yes I did. Telepathy not required -just reading comprehension.
And what? Spend an hour on a freezing, windy platform waiting for the next train? I’m sure that will help.
not everything always goes to plan. Despite everyone’s best intentions and plans, babies may sometimes cry for no particular reason, and be inconsolable.
If it happens in a restaurant or theatre or anywhere else where people generally have a choice about being at, I think it’s entirely reasonable to expect that the parents manage the situation by withdrawing, but there are some situations where it is not reasonable to expect that.
From the Wikipedia page:
Good Lord eh. 
Ha, you clearly have never had a baby. Not an older child, a baby. Babies cry sometimes and sometimes there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Obviously you can take a crying baby out of a restaurant but not everything is a restaurant.
So, you’re in a group of people hiding from Nazis and a baby - your baby - starts crying and won’t stop. Do you kill the child?
I recall telling a child she was acting very immature and that she should stop crying and act her age. She was about 4 weeks old at the time and stopped squalling as soon as I finished preparing a 4 oz bottle with her formula and plugged it into her pie hole. She was on a 2 or 4 hour schedule (I forget which) and her clock was about 10 minutes fast. But I couldn’t reason with her at all.
Oh, you weren’t the lady that brought your 6 month old to the showing of the latest Captain America that I saw. Because she stayed for the entire movie, even during the 5 different times junior went on a 2-3 minute crying jag!!
“In this situation” could easily refer to the situation of a child crying anywhere in public – you know, the topic of this thread. So maybe you should write more clearly if that’s not what you meant. Paragraphs are generally used to indicate a conversational shift. If there wasn’t a shift, don’t use a paragraph break.
People did. Because you can’t make a baby so crying.
My ancestors fled the czar by running through the woods, and they proactively doped my great aunt with ether so she wouldn’t cry and draw attention to them. I’m told they carried the drugged baby in a burlap sack.
But i think killing, or even etherizing, babies on airplanes is a bit heavy handed.
Around here public transit arrives about every ten minutes or less during the day. Might be every 30 in the dead of night, but I’d question having a baby out around town at 3am, short of an emergency, in which case call a cab or an ambulance.
So what? There are plenty of places in the world that aren’t like ‘around here’.
My local train station receives one service per hour in either direction. The platforms only have a small shelter which is open on two sides (i.e. two walls and a roof). About half of the railway stations around here are like that.
Anyway, RobDog said it better than me. There are any number of perfectly sound reasons why the parents of a crying child may not be able to just step off a train or bus, without putting themselves and their child in a worse situation; therefore, it’s not reasonable to expect them to, and the best thing is for those affected just to endure the noise. The noise is a lesser evil to me than eviction from the vehicle is to them.
Well, you still lose here, because the OP in this thread only names three situations, and only two of them are actually specific:
[ul]
[li]a crowded airplane[/li]li ‘public space’[/li][li]Hiding from the Gestapo[/li][/ul]
Paragraphs do not necessarily denote a shift of emphasis - they can also be used to discuss a single topic in three parts:
[ul]
[li]Define scope or premise[/li][li]Explain the point [/li][li]Sum up or conclude.[/li][/ul]
It’s called linking. I am guilty of using ‘this’ and ‘it’ in the second paragraph instead of explicitly restating the context, but I thought it was clear enough, especially as I bookended by mentioning public transport in the first and last paragraphs.
But what does it matter anyway. It sounds like even if you had understood me to mean public transport, you still think the right thing is for the parents to step out into the pissing rain so as to spare your ears.
:rolleyes: The TITLE OF THE THREAD is “The crying of a baby in public is…”
Not “The crying of a baby in an airplane.”
And I fail to see how I “lose here” with “public space” because, you know, that’s what I’m talking about.
I didn’t say a word about rain, but nice straw man.
Of course I’m talking about the public spaces / public transit I move around in. Babies can’t hurt my head if I’m not there to hear them. (By the way, did you even notice that I’d already said that shrieking babies cause me physical pain? And somehow I’m the bad guy for not wanting to be caused pain just for moving about in public?)
Look dude. We’re clearly not even talking about the same topic here, thanks to your unclear antecedents, so let it go already.