New Dad Gets Roasted for 'Making His Baby Cry' to Avoid a $100 Traffic Fine

A father had mixed feelings about deliberately making his baby cry to avoid a fine. He disobeyed traffic laws to get home faster and got blasted for being irresponsible.

In a post to Reddit, a father explained that he took their five-month-old baby to his parents for dinner to give his wife a well-deserved break.

During the ride back home with baby fast asleep in the back, the father got pulled over by a “lurking” traffic officer after he decided to cut time in getting home.

“On the way home, around 10 pm, I made a left in a no left. It saves me about 10 minutes because otherwise you have to go all the way around this huge park and then there are a bunch of one-way streets,” the father explained.

As the officer approached, the father turned the volume up on a static radio channel which immediately woke the baby up screaming. In doing so, the father hoped to avoid a traffic fine. “Here in Ontario, ‘disobey a sign’ is a $100 fine and two demerits (guess how I know…),” he wrote.

The father’s plan worked, and he got off without a fine and decided once he got home, to put the money he would have paid for the penalty into the baby’s college fund instead.

However, netizens quickly pointed out his reckless behavior. “Imagine what it would be like if everyone followed the rules of the road only when it suited them. You only need to be unlucky one time to mess up your and someone else's life,” one user commented.

“The fact that there’s not any traffic doesn’t mean that someone won’t come speeding through and hit you. The kid won’t remember the one time you woke him to get out of a ticket, but if you get into an accident, he might not ever get the chance to,” another added.

While the baby may not remember the incident in the future, the first couple of months of their lives sets the level of responsiveness between babies and their caregivers, according to research done by Ruth Feldman and Psychology Today.

Because babies can also be fussy during this time, caregivers should pay attention to their gestures and facial expressions so they can give comfort before the baby gets distressed.

Frequent stress trains babies bodies to be distrustful of themselves and others, which doesn’t become noticeable until years later when they become rigid, egotistical, and easily stressed out.

Punishment of babies also harms them in later years as they learn about life by the way they get treated. A parenting move that only breaks the trust between the caregiver and child while it undermines the child’s emotional growth and self-esteem.

Babies need a lot of care to get them off to a good start, and one of the best ways to do that is through responsive caregiving, meaning that the caregiver needs to be emotionally present to pay attention to the child’s particular situation.

Relatedly, another father sparked a heated debate after he took his daughter’s car away for breaking traffic laws.