Buying Tickets or Not?

Every so often the question come up about whether parents bringing infants into a place of public accommodation should be required to purchase an additional seat for the child, or whether they should be allowed to just keep the child on their laps. Airlines usually allow lap children, despite the risk of injury to the infants in the event of an accident (or even a rough landing) because they weren’t in car seats because the added expense would keep a lot of families from flying at all (you generally can’t leave the kid with a sitter for your entire vacation). Movie theaters and some concert venues allow this because it’s too much trouble to try to prevent it; sporting venues allow this because who really cares if a baby is crying when the entire building too noisy to hear him or her. But the real question isn’t so much how this practice affects the customers, or even how being held in someone’s lap for the whole event affects the baby; it’s whether or not this practice is fair to the other customers – a point brought home this year when the organizers for the Summer Olympics in London posted a policy of requiring all children attending to have their own tickets…

There was a short article about this on MSNBC.com, but the really interesting part of it was reading the (often spirited) debate in the comments section at the bottom of the page. You would probably expect people who have small children to be outraged by this policy, and complain bitterly about this discrimination against children and families; you might also expect people who don’t have small children to counter by pointing out that such activities are bad for the child, unpleasant for everyone else in the grandstand, and potentially disruptive to the events themselves (in situations where the athletes need to concentrate, for example). What was surprising was the number of parents with small children who shot back saying they would never be so rude as to inflict their infants on an unsuspecting public, or so careless as to expose their baby to a stadium-full of germs and pollutants – and the number of people who claim not to have small children who insist that it is wrong to limit someone’s freedom by telling them where they can or can’t take their infants…

I find myself focusing on the fact that no one in London or on the Olympic Committee is saying you can’t bring a child to these events – they’re saying that if you do, you have to buy the child a ticket, just like anyone else. This might be seen as a way of selling more tickets (several of the on-line commentators made that point), but it would certainly be more comfortable for all parties involved, avoid trouble with fire regulations and venue capacity, and eliminate arguments about why somebody under the age of 2 is there in the first place – if the parents bought an extra ticket they clearly aren’t bringing the kids along just because they’re too cheap to hire a sitter. At the same time, however, it won’t settle the arguments about whether the crying and other behaviors are fair to the other customers, or the claims that parents should be allowed to take their children anywhere they want, so long as the children don’t require any additional space…

In general, these questions should have common-sense solutions, based on the actual conditions. If you have a child who will just sleep through a sporting event in a sling you wear, I can’t see the harm in bringing him or her to the stadium. On the other hand, bringing any child to an age-inappropriate event (a PG rated movie, for example) is potentially harmful to the child, and extremely rude to anyone who wants to watch event in peace (toddlers in Lord of the Rings movies? Really?). The problem is, most people have no common sense, and all too many people believe that they should be allowed to do anything they want, regardless of how it affects anyone else. All of which leads me to conclude that while an “everyone buys a ticket” rules may be unpleasant, they’re probably a better idea than the alternative…