Stacey McLachlan makes the case for bringing your baby to the bar
The Vancouver Magazine editor's TEDxVancouver talk on lonely new parents has a comment section arguing about cafés, beer gardens and Cheers.
TEDx TalksStory of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 57,456 views a day, 112 times a normal first day on this channel (511).
Why you should bring your baby to the bar | Stacey McLachlan | TEDxVancouver
"Why you should bring your baby to the bar" is the kind of title that stops a thumb mid-scroll, and on the TEDx Talks channel it did exactly that. Stacey McLachlan's talk from TEDxVancouver passed 44,000 views in its first fifteen hours. A new talk here usually opens with a few hundred.
McLachlan is the editor-in-chief of Vancouver Magazine and a senior editor at Western Living, and the description adds that she performs and produces comedy on the side. That may explain why the talk is billed as "hilariously sharp." The subject underneath is a serious one: what the description calls the "black hole of parenthood," the isolation that sets in when a child effectively shuts parents out of adult social life. Her argument is that children should stop being kept out of grown-up spaces, and that people without kids gain from it too.
The comments arrived many times faster than on a usual TEDx first day, and they read like a debate in miniature. The most liked one asks why the cure for lonely parents has to involve alcohol, and suggests cafés, community centers and simply visiting each other's homes instead. Others point to German beer gardens that come with playgrounds, remember the baby on Cheers, or nominate Chuck E. Cheese as the venue that already exists. One viewer, who spent most of a year homeless, writes about how hard it is to find anywhere to take children without paying. A note from someone happily childfree by choice has started a thread of its own.
The talk shares the day with another fast starter that could hardly be further from it in tone. In "How to lead when everything falls apart," Wahid Majrooh, Afghanistan's former minister of public health, recalls running the country's health system as Kabul collapsed in 2021. Both talks follow Steve Chapman's ridiculous talk about lost cats, as we reported here, which is still just ahead of the two of them.
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What viewers say
Beer gardens in Germany almost always have playgrounds and they don’t have to fence them in.
@honeyclmSee it on YouTubeHey, Lillith's baby on Cheers learned how to talk (Norm!) at the Bar. Epic scene
@JohnBurris-l3tSee it on YouTubethat's a really good title
@dewanshgautam9371See it on YouTube
Public comments from the video's page on YouTube
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- Channel
- TEDx Talks
- Subscribers
- 44,700,000
- Channel views, pace per day
- 603,194 (on a normal day: 2,132,341)
- Video published
- October 4, 2026
- Video views so far
- 44,821 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 57,456
The numbers
For a channel whose new talks usually open with a few hundred views, this one started on a very different scale.
💡 Test your knowledge
Cheers, the sitcom a viewer brings up under the talk, is set in a bar in which city?
Cheers ran on NBC from 1982 to 1993 and is set in a neighborhood bar in Boston.
