When my son was six weeks old and there was little to do but fill the blurry days pushing his stroller from one arbitrary destination to another, I took him shopping at my favourite consignment store. As I walked around, he woke up and let out a piercing wail. I was already pivoting his stroller toward the exit when an employee looked up at me. “Oh,” she said knowingly, “that’s a new-baby cry.” She and another employee rushed to gaze at my furious, tiny baby while I prepared to apologize. “Mine never liked the stroller either,” she said. “Would you like me to hold him while you shop?”
I’ve often been struck by the unexpected generosity of strangers toward my babies, perhaps because I’ve absorbed the rhetoric that a noisy child is a blight on society. Recently, in Vancouver, a furious debate erupted online after an application to expand a daycare in a residential neighbourhood was denied, partly on the grounds that nearby residents objected to the noise. “I can’t escape the noise currently, so if she were to expand this daycare, we would have no peace,” one person argued in a hearing, as reported by journalist Dan Fumano. His column in the Vancouver Sun ignited an online firestorm of opprobrium, much of it from dismayed parents chasing the pipe dream of securing a child care spot (Vancouver has only one space for every five three-to-five-year-olds). But there was an undercurrent of sympathy for the aggrieved neighbours. “Children don’t just laugh,” columnist Sandy Garossino asserted on social media, while radio host Buzz Bishop complained about living next door to a daycare: “It’s eternal toddler preschool noise and it’s very irritating.”
