TORONTO -- The cartoon shows a mom pushing a stroller, but so busy staring at her phone that she doesn’t notice her baby has fallen out.
The accompanying text reads, “Mummy was busy on Instagram/When beautiful bubby fell out of the pram/And lay on the path unseen and alone/Wishing that he was loved like a phone.”
The image, by Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig, set off a storm of controversy in Australia earlier this week and also attracted some international attention from angry parents.
The artist’s own sister, who is also an artist, responded with an illustration on Facebook of her shooting her brother in the behind while a mother pushing a baby looks on. “Michael needs to listen to you for a change,” she wrote in the post to her readers.
Reaction on Twitter was harsh: “The problem isn't that he's just wrong …It's being wrong a) about someone's parenting; and b) doing so with an air of superiority,” wrote one user.
“I have seen a number of mothers talk about how the Leunig cartoon really upset them as they struggle with young babies. It isn't harmless,” another user tweeted.
Toronto-based parenting expert Alyson Schafer said parents should not feel discouraged when they feel they are being judged.
“Each of us is being called upon to make individual decisions for what’s best for our children, all the variables in our lives that maybe people are not apprised to,” she said.
Australian artist Paula Kuka captured this sentiment when she posted her reaction on Facebook with an illustration depicting more than a dozen things a mother did with her child titled “What I did”, and a second panel titled “What you saw,” showing the mother pushing a stroller and looking at her phone.
“I spent yesterday feeling a little angry and powerless about a particular cartoon by a well-known Australian cartoonist,” she wrote. “Today I realized I might be angry, but I’m not powerless. This is my response.”
Still, Schafer acknowledged there is some merit to Leunig’s commentary. “We may well be in denial about how much time we post,” she said.
“We do need to keep thinking about the balance between how much are we actually enjoying our kids and how much of their lives are we capturing, sharing with others, that may actually be detracting from the experience itself.”
Some social media users agree, calling the cartoon “realistic” and “pertinent.”
There have also been extreme cases reported in recent years that illustrate how dangerous technological distractions can be.
Several years ago, a couple was charged with child endangerment and neglect after their two-year-old was found barefoot and crying, trying to get inside the home. The couple admitted they had been playing Pokemon Go, and had left the house for as long as an hour and a half. And earlier this year, a Sudbury mother plead guilty after her 18-month-old son drowned in a bathtub while she was in another room chatting on Facebook.
But these are outliers, Schafer said.
Leunig, deemed a “Living Treasure” in Australia in 1999, gained popularity with his whimsical art style, but this is not the first time his cartoons have come under fire. He has courted controversy in the past with his anti-vaccination cartoons and his critical view of working mothers that was captured in a number of illustrations, most notably “Thoughts of a baby lying in a child care centre” in 1995.
