Ok, I am not sure this is a bitch exactly, but a query. I was in Value Village today and there was a woman in her 20s with a newborn, who was crying his head off. You could hear him around the store. The mom just rocked him in the stroller while checking out the wares. Several people, mostly women, came up to hear to ask if her baby was OK. She said “Yes, he’s just crying.” I noticed several women shaking their heads in judgement. Now this mom seemed to have it together, at least in appearances. Eventually she just left the store. As a mother myself, I learned not to listen to advice from other women. I raise my kid with common sense and she’s well taken care of. Do these women have a right to go up to this mom and question her motherly abilities? I thought they should be minding their own business. Babies do cry afterall.
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2008.
While I agree with OP that the other people in the store had no business passing judgementt on the young mother (I would have minded my own business), babies generally don’t “cry their head off” if there isn’t something wrong with them. Whether he was hungry, needed his diaper changed, or was passing a kidney stone, the point is the baby was uncomfortable and the mother should have attended to him. A 2 or 3 year old crying and throwing a tantrum might not have a “real” problem, but crying is the newborn baby’s only way of communicating, and finding out WHY your baby is crying is more important than shopping for 2nd hand clothes, IMO.
Maybe it was their polite way of implying that she should step up the efforts to quiet her squalling offspring. Just because she thinks her newborn is lifes greatest miracle doesn’t mean everyone else does….. nobody wants to listen to screaming infants/children in public spaces.
Every baby is different. If the baby does this all the time and every time she tends to him and takes him to the doctor it doesn’t do anything, the baby may just be a crier. Some babies need to cry and move on. While its annoying to hear a baby crying for a few moments of your life, should she allow it to dictate her entire life? The baby will grow out of it.Not to say this is the case, but every baby is different and one should not pass a judgment (assumption) erring on the negative possibilities.
I’m with hellakitty. Toddlers may cry with a motive, but infants cry for a reason. If an infant is crying, there is something wrong with it. It’s a parent’s responsibility to try to find out what that is. Sometimes you can’t figure it out. Sometimes the cause of the baby’s unhappiness remains a mystery and the baby continues to cry. But to just shrug indifferently and say, “yeah, whatever, he’s just crying”, I don’t think that’s good parenting. On the other hand, I think Jai probably has the right answer. It was a polite way of saying, “would you DO something about that fucking noise?” And really, you hear babies crying all the time, and you just deal with it. If people were actually going up to this woman and commenting on it, it must have been pretty extreme.
Geeze, I must have been a considerate mother – when one of my kids would cry, babies or toddlers, I hauled them out of the store immediately because I didn’t want to disrupt the other shoppers. As Jai said, nobody wants to listen to screaming kids, even parents like me.