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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

> Darwin was in a stroller, and I was rocking him back and forth to sleep. When he started babbling and cooing, I moved to the back of the room. That's when someone approached me and said, "Would you like to stroll your baby outside? I want people to get the full experience out of this conference."

I am a dad who brings kids everywhere. This is an entirely polite and reasonable response. If my kids are being distracting, I appreciate being told and have zero problem taking a baby out to calm down. They never said she had to leave because she had a baby.

It's great when others are chill around your kids, but I would never just force random people to have to put up with children.

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Contextualize the event, though. Womanhood and motherhood are often quite strongly connected. An event celebrating and developing women should anticipate a higher percentage of the audience will be mothers with infants.

Be prepared for that, communicate with your audience in advance, have clear expectations with staff, perhaps be more permissive with infants, etc.

The context matters here.

> Womanhood and motherhood are often quite strongly connected

Was there on-site childcare?

"The context matters here."

It shouldn't. I have two young kids. My youngest has started making loud noises/talking during events like this and I immediately headed for the door with her. It's completely inconsiderate to the other people in the room.

Read the rest of my post again. It's not just the parent I'm discussing.

STFU

I'm generally quite strongly on the side of being considerate of other people for a continental European, but in the particular case of children I kind of disagree. Children are an annoying but absolutely necessary part of society. They will work for our pensions and care for us when we are old. They should be everyone's problem and responsibility, not just the parents.

> They will work for our pensions and care for us when we are old.

That sentence sent chills down my spine.

Life is an end in itself. It is a not a means to the ends of others. Your children are no more my responsibility than they are my tool to serve me in old age. My pension and care in old age is not their responsibility any more than their behaviour is my obligation to put up with.

If this sounds strange and overly "individualistic" then let me frame the issue in a slightly different way.

If we accept that children are an "absolutely necessary part of society" because "they will work for our pensions and care for us when we are old" then what happens if people choose not to have children? Are childless (by choice) people parasites in such a society? If more and more people decide to not have children is there a point where this becomes a social crises to the point where we start forcing people to have children?

And what about children who decide to emigrate as adults? Is there a point where you prevent people from travelling in order to guarantee that you have enough people around to pay pensions and take care of old people?

Not that it should matter, but I write this a middle-aged parent of two adult daughters who I do not hold to any sort of moral obligation to take care of me when I'm old. If they choose to then cool, I guess, but it's their life to live as they choose. The mere fact that they exist does not automatically obligate them to anyone else for any purpose.

>My pension and care in old age is not their responsibility any more than their behaviour is my obligation to put up with.

You may think this ought not be true, but as a matter of reality it is. Each generation carries the weight of the previous one through retirement. Is it just? I think so - but regardless of that, it is the agreement every child is born into.

>Are childless (by choice) people parasites in such a society?

Somewhat, but it is rude to point that out.

> You may think this ought not be true, but as a matter of reality it is. Each generation carries the weight of the previous one through retirement.

To the extent that this is true, it is by choice.

> Is it just? I think so - but regardless of that, it is the agreement every child is born into.

"Agreement" presupposes the consent of each party. You cannot be entered into an "agreement" without your own participation in the act of agreeing.

Children cannot consent, therefore this is no "agreement" by definition.

What you have called an "agreement" is more appropriately referred to as a "duty." There is a very critical distinction between the two concepts which I will elaborate on in a moment.

> Somewhat, but it is rude to point that out.

What do manners have to do with anything?

What you're describing is the concept of duty. You're saying that by virtue of just being born, a child is obligated to care for his or her elders through retirement and that their personal choices are irrelevant.

In this case there is a very important question: "What are you going to do about it when the child says 'no'?"

You can either do nothing, which is a valid option, but it means that the entire concept and discussion was moot. You can invent "duties" all you want, but people ultimately get to decide how to live their own lives and there's nothing you can do about it.

Or, you can pass laws and use force in order to compel people to do certain things "for the good of society."

Which brings me to why I asked the question: "Are people who choose to be child-free parasites?"

That's a very important question because if a "society" depends on children in order to pay peoples' pensions and to take care of them when they are older, and that dependence is so fundamental that we consider people who choose not have children "parasites", and we obligate children to a duty to take care of elders ... then you've weakened the recognition of individual rights (at least reproductive rights and the right to travel / emigrate) to such an extent that you've opened the door to banning contraception, abortion and freedom of travel.

>To the extent that this is true, it is by choice.

For anyone in a western country it is not by choice. Your wages get taxed and put towards social security, elderly housing, and Medicare (or equivalent). The work you do to get those wages keeps companies in business, meaning the stock portfolios of those that built them for retirement have value and can be liquidated. Unless you fully disconnect from society, you are responsible for the retirement of those who came before you.

>You're saying that by virtue of just being born, a child is obligated to care for his or her elders through retirement and that their personal choices are irrelevant.

This is putting words into my mouth. I have never prescribed anything, just described things as I see them. It seems plainly obvious to me that simply by working and living, you are putting fuel into the machine that powers your elders' retirement.

>Or, you can pass laws and use force in order to compel people to do certain things "for the good of society."

We already do this, try your luck with the IRS after not paying your social security tax. I do not understand how you envision the world.

I think the question comes down to what is reasonable accommodation. As others have said, allowing you to bring your child to the conference seems reasonable. As does asking you to step outside when your child becomes a distraction.

In the US workforce, there are laws about what constitutes a reasonable accommodation for a disability. If you have a mobility restriction, it’s reasonable to ask for a first floor office, but not that the owner install an elevator.

>They never said she had to leave because she had a baby.

"To me, that's ridiculous. [for one of the partners of Y Combinator to] ask me to leave [("do you want to take your baby outside")] with a quietly cooing baby during a talk that was explicitly about the challenges of being a mother and founder was shocking. I realized then that the monster of systemic barriers to entrepreneurs who are also moms is bigger than I ever realized." - FTA

Imagine a medical conference about new treatments for allergies. Now imagine if one of the attendees had a never ending sneezing/coughing fit. Would it not be reasonable to ask that person to step outside to avoid distraction? I don't think the topic of the talk means related distractions should be ignored.

"Imagine a hypothetical and quite silly scenario, which I've constructed to be obviously absurd" isn't a great rhetorical device.

There's no need for analogizing here, we have a clear scenario we can discuss directly - a woman was asked to leave an event discussing motherhood because her baby was deemed a distraction.

We are plenty capable of just discussing that without made up scenarios.

Analogies are often useful to remove the emotional charge of a discussion (like those related to parenting) to try and pin down more rational principles.

Yes, they are often useful for that. Not in this case.

This reads as a shallow dismissal. If your goal is to arrive at first principles, I disagree. As others have said, it's difficult for many to have a discussion about parenting because it's so central to many people's identity that it becomes emotionally charged. It's much more difficult to ascertain core principles amid emotional reactions. Which part do you disagree with: that people are sensitive to judgements related to parenting or that it's harder to get a principled argument from an emotional reaction? Or put differently, what is unique about this case where you don't think those rules apply?

It is a shallow dismissal, you've read it correctly. Your analogy was silly, parenting is emotional (and being emotional isn't negative), and the situation was quite straightforward and needed no simplification.

>It is a shallow dismissal, you've read it correctly. Your analogy was silly,

You may want to familiarize yourself with the HN guidelines:

>Please don't post shallow dismissals

>When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

A better response could have either answered which of those points you actually disagree with and why, or if you don’t disagree with the points but just the analogy, offer up a better analogy.

>the situation was quite straightforward and needed no simplification.

To reiterate, the point of the analogy is not to simplify as you've suggested, but to cast it in a less emotional light given the impediments strong emotion can put up to rational discourse.

To clarify further, I never said emotions are are inherently negative. I did say they can inhibit a discussion that is trying to get to rational underlying principles. We have lots of societal arrangements that acknowledge and try to mitigate this fact. Considering your reaction and apparent unwillingness/inability to answer very direct questions related to parenting seems to prove that point, as do the other commenters who have acknowledged any comments on parenting can become a third-rail in discussion due to this fact.

Not a big fan of kids (as in having them around), not a dad, counterpoint: If there's one societal function that's fundamental it's having kids. I think forcing random people to put up with your children is probably the most defensible thing you can force upon other people.

Not to say that it's not great if you can be considerate to others while you have kids. But considering how inconsiderate kids are and how much everyone around you depends on you having kids, some amount of putting up with those kids, collectively, seems very okay.

I think society, in general, is fairly considerate of parents. But it also means, in certain contexts, parents need to be considerate of the rest of society. If your kid is being inconsiderate at a professional event, or church, or a movie theater etc., I think the reasonable thing to do is step outside until your child is able to come back to being considerate.

Is this an opinion you have as a parent or a non-parent?

Do parents not expect other parents to act with consideration to other members of society? I believe the fundamental principle remains the same in either instance.

Whether or not I have a disability does not change my mind about whether people in a wheelchair should board a plane first.

My kids get to be the absolute center of my world, but I’m careful not to expect them to be the center of anyone else’s.

being a parent changes your perception about the challenges other parents face. it is one thing for me as a parent to realize that my kid is disruptive and step outside unprompted, but quite another for someone to ask me to leave. the latter would make me very uncomfortable, and needs to be handled with extreme tact and consideration.

>the latter would make me very uncomfortable

Genuine question, but why would this make you feel uncomfortable?

>needs to be handled with extreme tact and consideration.

Did you think they acted without tact? By the authors own account, they seemed very polite and even sent a follow-up email. The founders account of the interaction made it seem even more polite (asking her if she needed help, offering to hold the baby, offering other areas where she could still hear the talk but not be as much of a distraction etc.)

being asked to leave implies that i am either oblivious towards the disruption my kids cause, or that i simply misjudge the situation and thought my kids are not as disruptive as the person asking me felt about it. both imply a judgement of my behavior, and that alone will make me uncomfortable. i do admit that i am biased by my experience in china where something like that would never happen as i explain here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41438834

not having experienced the situation i can't judge, but the fact that it prompted the person to write an article about it to me suggests that on some level it did make her feel uncomfortable. if it hadn't it wouldn't have been worth mentioning.

Sure. After reading both accounts, it came across to me that the founder with the baby was being overly sensitive and chose to steer into the least favorable interpretation. We should strive to be polite but we shouldn't avoid confrontation just because someone may take it the wrong way, especially when doing so comes at the detriment of other people's experiences.

having read the response now too, i have to agree

I hold myself to that standard but I also think that we should be tolerant of young children amongst us. We were all there once.

I don’t think anyone is advocating intolerance towards children, but rather trying to define what is reasonable. A loud child in a restaurant might be ok, but a child screaming and throwing food less so. After reading both accounts, I get the feeling the founder with a baby has an expectation that is miscalibrated to what most people consider would be reasonable.

after moving to china any preconceptions i had about western people being considerate of children (and parents) went out the window. chinese not only tolerate children, but they allow them to get away with anything, almost to a fault even. i have never once seen anyone complain about children. they bring them to work and they care when someone needs help in levels that a western parent would consider intrusive. and any disruption they simply ignore. after experiencing that, asking a parent to step outside to me now feels rather rude and inconsiderate.

Do you think this is how it's always been in China or do you think this is a response to how their attitudes towards children have changed?

The US tends to have a very individualistic outlook compared to many other societies, so I think differences should be expected to differ from culture to culture. In the US, it would make me very uncomfortable to have keep my child in a movie theater making noises if I felt like it was inhibiting on someone else's enjoyment of a movie, for instance.

i believe it has been like that all the time, because in the times without insurance and pensions children where the ones who cared for you when you get old and so people depended on their kids and it logically makes sense that they would show extreme care for them growing up. (this also reflects in the attitude of future grandparents who to this day push their children to get married and have kids. sometimes in extreme ways)

>the times without insurance and pensions children where the ones who cared for you when you get old and so people depended on their kids and it logically makes sense that they would show extreme care for them growing up

This has been the case for most agrarian economies, including the US in the past so I’m not sure that’s a good discriminator.

that's a fair point. i haven't read anything about how children were treated in china in the past. i am more familiar with stories about treatment of children in historical europe. in short, in europe children were seen as a necessary nuisance (someone mentioned cattle)

but from that i want to draw a few observations: i think attitude towards children in europe either has improved or it hasn't changed. if it hasn't changed, then why should it have changed in china? but even if it has improved, on one hand it is still way behind china by comparison, but on the other hand we stopped depending on direct children a few decades earlier than china, so if there was a parallel development then china would have to be a few decades behind europe with their changing attitude towards children. that being not the case suggests that there was no change in attitude at all, or at least not one prompted by a modern pension system and therefore the chinese attitude towards children could not be a new thing.

Even if they have changed, I seriously doubt you can distill something complex like societal interactions and norms down to a simple one-variable model like the introduction of pensions.

right. another reason why i am skeptical that any change happened.

Society norms definitely shift. My point is that that change is generally the result of a highly dynamic and complicated process, rather than pointing to a single cause.

This has not matched my experience in seeing children being raised in other countries in Asia, though I have not spent significant time in China itself, particularly around parents and their children, so I can't comment there. I will say that does not match the behavior I have seen of first generation or even second generation Chinese immigrants in America, however.

My anecdotal experience, primarily driven by my time in Japan as well as living in a place that has a very large Asian immigrant population is that they are as strict when it becomes to the behavior of their children as any Westerner, and often moreso. When I go to the local H-mart, I am far more likely to see a parent corralling their child and getting them to behave than when I see similar behavior out of kids from western parents at the Safeway

Perhaps this holds true in China itself, but I don't believe the distinction is purely East vs. West.

When I go to the local H-mart, I am far more likely to see a parent corralling their child and getting them to behave

i don't want to claim that my experience is the norm, but this sentence in particular reminded me that my distinct first impression in china was like "boy they do let their kids here get away with anything"

add to that the reputation of the single child policy creating "little emperors" because of how parents raise their child.

but again, this is just my experience. it may well possible that this is a small minority, and that i just never saw parents corralling their children because they possibly were already effective at raising them to be well behaved.

it is also worth noting that i observed a much higher tolerance at people behaving out of the norm. (but then it is also a much rarer occurrence and it is also not considered polite to confront people)

> But considering how inconsiderate kids are and how much everyone around you depends on you having kids, some amount of putting up with those kids, collectively, seems very okay.

Which is why letting you bring your kids, but then also politely letting you know when your kids are being a distraction should be a totally acceptable compromise.

The problem is only when a parent takes any amount of confrontation to be a form of societal oppression and writes an expose on it on Business Insider (for example).

Assume they know their kids are a distraction (the implication that they might not makes me cringe a little) and they still want to participate. How much is that a burden we share vs a right parents have to fight for and can be denied?

If it’s a free event, have at it. If I had to pay to attend, then I see it differently.

Just a nit, but there’s a big difference between establishing a social norm and establishing a legally protected right.

I am a father of three and I strongly disagree with you. I respect the right for others to enjoy their day without having to deal with someone else's loud or misbehaving children. I myself don't enjoy strangers' kids being loud and fully empathise with people who don't have kids. I have no problem removing myself and my children from a place is we're being a nuisance.

Congratulations on fully understanding the situation. There are a lot of such failed provocations unfortunately. Like the short movie in Poland with the lady on the bus who showed a piece of footage in which the bus driver asks her out of the vehicle, and it was an article along the lines of ‘he asked me out of the bus because I was with my child’, while the entire surveillance footage of the bus reveals that the driver asked the mother to fasten her pram with a seatbelt in a suitable place. She refused and the driver asked her out because she did not comply with his instructions and rules related to transport. People who have children completely fail to understand or do not want to understand people who have made a conscious decision not to have them.

Thanks for this comment, your commentary is uplifting.

"Would you like to stroll your baby outside? I want people to get the full experience out of this conference."

According to response from the organizer, the offer here was to help the mom get the full experience by offering her accommodations so that she doesn't have to miss any part of the presentation despite having her child with her.

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