A Baby Walks Into A Bar

Everyone needs to get out more.

Would I take my kids to a bar? It really depends. There’s a brewery nearby with a kids menu and high chairs in the dining room, and a good pub by the river with outdoor seating and live music. I live in New York’s Hudson Valley, where every third business is a coffee shop-slash-taphouse or a bookstore-slash-barroom. My kids’ presence there relies on the time of day and our aggregate bandwidth, but generally speaking, so long as a place is physically safe, thematically appropriate, and can tolerate a little noise, I have no issue taking my children there during pre-bedtime hours. Plenty of bars are explicitly reserved for people older than 21, and that’s that.

There’s no axiomatic answer about whether a child can be near beer. It’s nuanced, which is to say, impossible to discuss in any sane fashion on Twitter. Unfortunately, sanity is no obstacle to internet discourse and social media has simmered for weeks with debate over hypothetical children in places where alcohol is served.

This is only superficially a discussion about kids in bars. Look no further than the replies to any tweet bemoaning kids in bars, and you’ll find a conversation that quickly devolves into opposition to children in coffee shops, airplanes, and in general. It’s a discussion about children and caregivers’ access to shared spaces which—as they vanish—have become increasingly given to the language of customer service, less to the logic of coexistence.

As a gray area for kids’ participation, bars are a rhetorical edge case, one that can serve as an entrypoint to arguments for additional exclusion, or offered up as defense against allegations of hating children. When I tweeted recently that it’s not cool to openly dislike children (because hating a vulnerable class for their immutable physical characteristics is fucked up and we would recognize it as such with virtually any other group) people in my replies immediately started arguing against allowing children in bars near “drunk” adults. I hadn’t mentioned bars! I hadn’t mentioned anywhere! 

I almost appreciated the honesty of one reply-guy who said he genuinely disliked kids. I almost appreciated it because this attitude is visibly true in the actions some people perform toward society’s most vulnerable, in bars or otherwise. 

Any parent can recall instances of performative hostility toward kids. As I wrote this, a dad in my parenting groupchat reported that he was in a coffee shop where a woman took a loud, 20-minute Zoom call, then turned her ire toward a nearby toddler.

“She's set up right next to a little kid play area, and just as her call ended, an 18mo or so came trundling over and started banging away with the blocks and cars,” he wrote. “I'm now watching the woman shoot occasional glowering daggers at the kid for making so much noise right next to her.”

On a recent train trip, my kids and I took the only available spots, in a three-seater occupied by one woman who rolled her eyes at our approach and made a dramatic sound of disgust when my toddler announced “choo-choo!” (My kids were angels and she took a long phone call about her plans to travel France. I wish to god I were exaggerating.)

I can understand pushback on the notion that all women ought to love children in preparation for having children of their own. But this is something else: a weird and cultivated misanthropy that, for all its foot-stomping about grownup-only spaces, isn’t very adult.

It’s not lost on me that this argument against children in public comes amid an overall contraction of American public life. Americans spend markedly more time alone and have significantly fewer friends than in decades past. The trend was exacerbated by Covid, but also took place after and preceding the pandemic, with a notable uptick in the early 2010s when smartphone use became ubiquitous. Even pets (and I love my dog) might serve as inadvertent markers of America’s increasing introversion. A recent tweet that fueled the kids-in-bars debate featured a man celebrating a sign that advertised a bar as dog-friendly and child-free. While our relationships with pets and people should not stand in tension, the reality is that our time spent with pets has approximately doubled in recent decades and now surpasses time spent socializing with people, which has plummeted. Pets, through no fault of their own, have become avatars of our own decidedly more confined lives.

Overwork, underinvestment in public spaces, and too much time spent on screens can leave us atomized, estranged from one another, and unwilling to take on the work of engaging with others as IRL equals. As those relationships wane, it stands to reason that a greater percentage of our interactions take place in the strict hierarchies of the workplace, or as customers giving orders in a system that is increasingly governed by app-based rating systems and online consumer complaints. Our social facetime is way down, but it has never been easier to demand a manicured consumer experience, sanitized of other people who might slightly inconvenience you. If you are an adult with leisure time, it is very easy to pretend yourself the protagonist of reality for a little while. 

Of course this is a fantasy, one undermined by the simple necessity of caring for other people. 

Let me make an unkind inference. I do not believe most people arguing online against babies in bars have actually been troubled by babies in bars. I think this behavior is a wounded reflex by people who (in a society that has made many adult achievements financially unattainable) feel insecure in their adult authority, and seek to define themselves against some less-powerful class. I think the prioritization of adult convenience over children’s existence represents its own sort of immaturity, an endless adolescence unburdened by obligations to others. I even think that reluctance toward care is understandable in a society without a safety net, in which caregivers face financial precarity and social marginalization.

I think people would feel more charitable toward children and caregivers in a society that allowed everyone to afford parenthood or opt out if they desired.

Kids have been hanging out in pubs since time immemorial. Are there occasions to leave the kids at home with another adult? Yes, and those are usually pretty evident and determined on a case-by-case basis. This whole online exercise is an excuse to draw and enforce an arbitrary wall against some sectors of society, in place of the porous boundary that has seen adults and children strategically share drinking spaces since the dawn of drinking.

Everyone needs to get out more. Even/especially with kids.