As a childless man who hates sunshine, parties and the countryside, I am among the last people who should be consulted about banning young children from public places. What do you expect me to say? To quote an unfairly misused businessman in Charles Dickens’s most adapted story, “Are there no … union workhouses?”
Okay, I don’t exactly think that. But this week’s contretemps at the Cincinnati Open tennis tournament did bring out the Scrooge in me. Emma Raducanu became visibly irritated at the continuous crying of a small child. As the British ace prepared to serve, she turned to the umpire and remarked, “It’s been, like, 10 minutes.”
Here’s where it got interesting. “It’s a child. Do you want me to send the child out of the stadium?” the umpire replied in an apparently puzzled tone. Not unreasonably, Raducanu, who seems a polite young woman, gestured in exasperation to those fans who were answering the (presumably rhetorical) question with a firm “Yes!”
As ever with such viral moments, if you dig a little deeper you discover the lines of combat were not so starkly drawn as online commentary suggested. “I can call in, but we need to continue for the moment,” the umpire said during a later break.
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Raducanu, ranked 39th in the world, did go on to lose the match against Aryna Sabalenka but, taking the world number one to a tiebreak in the deciding third set of an excellent match, the Brit recovered impressively from that irritating distraction.
Never mind reality. The online mob had soon gathered a library of related issues to chew over. Polls came out in favour of expelling wailing children. The cadre of digital grumps who like to “blame the parents” were there to blame the parents.
One entertaining strain of pointless whinge wondered why tennis and golf – unlike, say, boxing or soccer – demand that audiences remain silent during play.
Was this a class thing? Well, not really. For all the waistcoats and bow ties, snooker, during which sepulchral calm reigns, remains a working-class sport. The notion that any referee might allow a baby to cry himself out while Mark Selby was accumulating 147 is beyond absurd.
Individual sports that require focused attention on a discrete task – putting a golf ball, serving at Wimbledon, cueing on the baize – are in a different category from those in which a player strives continuously as one collective against another. Even the famously raucous crowd at darts matches will quieten down a little when Luke Littler approaches the oche.
Most of the debate was, however, around the age-old question of where we should allow young people to be and how we should then expect them to behave. People who aren’t me (honest) favour the approach taken by stern imperialist fathers in 19th-century England. They would be shown a son at birth and not meet him again until, standing nervously before their mahogany desk, he said goodbye in uniform before going off to be garotted in Bechuanaland. Get this right and it was almost like not having children at all.
Don’t mind my facetious ragging. It is now a happier time to be a parent and to be a child. Over the past 50 years or so we have allowed the walls between generations to fall away. We go to restaurants together. We attend sporting events together. A few thousand teenagers will, no doubt, be accompanying parental Oasis fans to see that Status Quo tribute act at Croke Park this weekend. Good luck to them.
They were always better at this in mainland Europe. The French snort at the notion of not allowing their eerily well-behaved children to share every social event. That’s probably how they got to be so eerily well-behaved.
For all that, the discussion around Raducanu’s inconvenience reflected a belief that too many parents have now got a little too indulgent of their littler ones. You really should not bring babies to operas, cinemas or snooker tournaments. If you do then you should be prepared to remove them once they make any noise louder than a gentle sniffle.
There is a separate debate to be had (look, I’m pretending to be tolerant here) about whether venues should make more allowances for parents of young children: glassed-off areas, creche arrangements, whatever the heck else these people want. But, while such facilities remain unavailable, those attending should expect the conventions to be observed. You turn off your mobile phone. You muffle sneezes.
“It’s a child!” is a perfectly reasonable riposte to some jerk complaining about your offspring crying in the supermarket. It does nothing to excuse your bringing the unfortunate wee fellow to Fidelio or the French Open. Which, now I think of it, is me admitting that, yes, I blame the parents.
