Man Yells At Mom For Bringing Crying Baby To A Restaurant — 'No One Wants To Hear Your Baby, You're Not Special'
Are new moms supposed to just not leave the house until their children go to college?
erllre from Getty Images | Canva Pro There are few things that can more quickly ruin a meal in a restaurant than a screaming baby at an adjacent table, but one new mom's recent encounter with a fellow restaurant patron who was disgruntled with her baby seems way over the line.
The situation has sparked a conversation online about what should be expected of new parents while eating out in public.
A new mom was yelled at by a man for having a crying baby to a restaurant.
The new mom shared her story in a Reddit post. She asked if she was in the wrong for bringing her 3-month-old baby to a neighborhood gastropub. The restaurant was casual and serves a wide-ranging clientele, not the sort of elegant, upscale establishment where one would expect a quiet, intimate experience.
"There are often families with kids here," she said, "so it’s not like we took the baby to a kid-free environment."
Still, when her baby got fussy, as babies tend to do, things quickly became dramatic. She grabbed a pacifier and blanket and made her way to the door, hoping to get there before her baby started crying. But before she made it to the exit, her baby started screaming.
"Had what happened next not happened, the baby would have been crying in the restaurant for no more than 20 seconds," she wrote. Rather than simply let her continue making her way to the exit, a man who was on a date at an adjacent table called after her. "He yelled... something to the effect of, 'No one wants to hear your baby. You’re not special.'"
The mom now wonders if she was wrong for bringing her baby to the restaurant, and asks how she should handle things in the future.
Despite the fact that the mom was on her way out the door, the man who yelled at her still wouldn't give it a rest. She wrote that she's "not a confrontational person," so she turned and continued her exit after the man berated her.
But when she came back in with her now perfectly content baby, the man tried to engage with her again, and when she ignored him, "we got dirty looks from the man and his date until they left."
Reddit
Despite how over the top the man's reaction was, and how briefly the baby inconvenienced other diners, the mom still wonders if she's in the wrong, especially after having talked to some fellow moms about it.
"They’re split," she says. "Some say he was wrong, some say that I shouldn’t have taken the baby out until he was older, and some say that they don’t take their kids out to eat at all because it’s rude to other people."
Most people thought the mom did nothing wrong and that people's expectations for new parents are way out of line.
Podcast "Two Hot Takes" took on this debate in an episode, and were firmly on the mom's side. Answering the mom's question as to whether she was in the wrong, one of the podcast's hosts exclaimed "Absolutely not!... And also, what happened to just saying, 'eff you?'"
"I would have not left without a fistfight," the podcast host continued, "because I feel like people forget that babies are humans. Babies are people. They are individuals. Babies are allowed to go places."
I'm ashamed to admit that I used to be exactly this type of demanding, entitled person who considered it a personal attack when a baby cried in his presence. That is until my siblings and friends started having kids. Seeing firsthand how hard it actually is to exist while bringing up a baby quickly changed my mind about parenting.
Now, I want to ask those disgruntled patrons: What exactly do you expect parents to do? Allowing a baby to shriek and throw a fit with no intervention in a shared public space is one thing, but that's not what happened here. The man felt the need to berate her in public while she was already walking out with her baby.
That is an absurd reaction unless your expectation is that new moms remain housebound shut-ins until their babies are grown adults who know which fork to use at each stage of a twelve-course meal.
If anyone thinks they're "special," it's a guy who thinks he's entitled to hurl profanity at a new mom in public simply because he hates kids. Or, as a commenter on TikTok put it, "My response [would have been] 'I need him to be out at restaurants early so he doesn’t act like you when he’s older.'" Learn some manners, sir. You're not special.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.