When a cinema in Bath applied to for a licence to screen 15- and 18-certificate films at mother-and-baby screenings, Bath and North East Somerset council refused them for two reasons: “Children aged up to 24 months are at a prime stage of their brain development,” began the first. “Toddlers can’t fully understand and interpret what they are seeing, but the images and sounds can be frightening and cause emotional trauma.” Secondly, restraining a baby on a parent’s lap could harm it emotionally or physically.

Ah, familiar outrage: your baby grows up, but that distinctive baby-culture, the puffed-up risk aversion, the pseudo-neuroscience, the hyper-orthodoxy, it is always enraging in the same way. These screenings are for babies under one: the difference between Harry Potter and Fifty Shades of Grey is really marginal, or, if you prefer, totally nonexistent, to anyone so young. You would have to be either childless or amnesiac not to know that toddlers are in a completely different category. “Restraint on a parent’s lap” – or what a layperson might call “cuddling” – is unlikely to cause emotional or physical harm. This bullshit – a way of framing the maternal world so that the mother is always policed, and is relevant only in the degree to which she serves or fails her baby – makes my blood boil.

But, at 11am on Monday morning, on their way in to see Skate Kitchen (certificate 15) at the Brixton Ritzy, the new mothers of south London are extremely zen. Jenny Banks is with her three-month- old baby, Arthur, her second son: “First time around you’re a bit more vulnerable to whatever the trending article is on Facebook. You care less what people think, the second time. And you’ve succumbed to the reality of not being a perfect parent.” She is meeting Charlotte Saini, whose three-month-old baby Jemima is her first: they come to the cinema regularly, and “it’s all been adult films. Some of them have been a bit crap, but never because they were a PG. It is interesting, if people think content is affecting the babies.” There is something gracious in the way she says “interesting”, when her tone conveys something more like “silly”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gemma Browne with five-week-old Lara outside the Ritzy cinema, Brixton, London. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

Gemma Browne is at baby cinema for the first time, with five-week-old Lara, who is fast asleep. “I want to do something that makes me feel like a normal, human adult,” she says. “People run ridiculous things – workshops in French singing for babies from age nought. Rock’n’roll classes. She doesn’t even know that her hands are attached to her body. But there are loads of things that are for adults. Last week I went to mother-and-baby standup, comedians do their normal routines, but the audience is all sober and it’s the middle of the day.” She recalls one woman arriving and not realising it was a baby standup. The comedian shouted: “Where’s your fucking baby?” Of the many things new babies have over toddlers, says Jenny, one is that “they don’t have very strong opinions so long as they’re with you, and they can’t move”. Plus, of course, you’re allowed to swear in front of them (though whether or not Bath council would give you a licence to is another question). “There’s this strong message around self-care at the moment,” Gemma continues. “I’m not getting a lot of sleep so I’m already a bit of a zombie. I think everyone’s realised that you need to be sane as a mum.” Esther Malloy’s baby, Eric, meanwhile, is 13 weeks old. “It’s early days. I’m still, now, learning how to get out of the front door. So it’s good to have something to aim for.”

There is something so distinctive, so heady, about a mother-and-baby screening: there is none of the urgent din that older babies make. It’s all snuffling, tiny croaks and squeaks, the sound of people coming to life in Dolby stereo. I took my son to these things a decade ago and I used to get furious when they put on a film that wasn’t adult enough. I remember complaining to my mother-in-law, when they screened The Golden Compass, the dramatisation of a Philip Pullman novel. She said: “Isn’t that about the occult? He shouldn’t be seeing that!” So I dropped that line of moaning, realising that we had more urgent work establishing a cross-family code about child-rearing and witchcraft. I am cast irresistibly back there, not so much by the noises and not at all by the smell (honest), but by that peculiar warmth in the room. New mothers are so nice to each other. It has to be some kind of evolutionary thing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Esther Malloy, with 13-week-old Eric at the Ritzy cinema, Brixton, London. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

Which is not to say that they are pushovers. Sasha Barton, with 11-week-old baby Otto, has had to cross (a bit of) London to the Ritzy because her local council shares Somerset’s high morals. Southwark also obliges cinemas to abide by the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification) guidelines, which means that children cannot watch an adult film, or a 12, even if they’re too young to know they’re at the cinema. “When I found out they were showing Crazy Rich Asians for the third time,” says Barton, “I phoned Southwark council to say: ‘Seriously, we shouldn’t have to watch this drivel.’ They said: ‘We take our safeguarding extremely seriously and those are the guidelines.’ But these are advisory guidelines. Of course, the final say is with the council. I’m a public law solicitor specialising in judicial review. It’s such a small thing, but it’s important.”

It is always hard to explain why it matters: what is wrong with belt-and-braces advice? Is it the end of the world when those in authority over-interpret the rules, and overstate the risks? Bluntly, yes: it’s a subtle way of marginalising a parent’s judgment. When people say, “I do this to stay sane,” they are not just talking about the need to stay “in the loop”, as Esther described. Something in the spirit rears up against being warned of a danger that feels concocted.

The tide does seem to be turning against parental hyper-vigilance, towards a more trusting creed that no one is perfect. As well as the standup comedy, Charlotte went to an NCT wine-tasting last week. “You don’t give it to the babies,” she explains, helpfully. “I don’t remember any wine tastings three years ago, or anyone drinking anything at all,” Jenny says. “Not because they didn’t drink; just because they were breastfeeding.” Even at the most everyday level, Gemma says, attitudes have changed: “Five years ago, I remember mums wouldn’t even leave their baby crying while they brushed their teeth.”

As for Skate Kitchen, it does have some adult themes, and would introduce babies, were they sentient to its messages, to dope, mildly offensive language, teenage defiance and sex. The core characters, a group of girls, spend an above-average amount of time discussing what their vaginas look like. It opens with a painfully evocative sequence in which the protagonist does herself a terrible skateboard mischief - they call it credit-carding – where you fall awkwardly and the board slices into your vagina. So I would say this is an incredibly insensitive film to show people who have just given birth, but the babies, I know with every fibre of my being, were oblivious.

A mother who wishes to remain nameless – she was meant to return to work this week, I believe – has brought her baby who, at 11 months, is at the tail-end of the age range. “I literally know the timetables of every baby screening in every cinema in south London.” Her daughter beams at us: still too young to recognise a skateboard, or indeed anything else, she is getting towards the age of being too old, too alert, too bouncy, to sit through a two-hour film. Her next outing will probably be a Pixar toddler screening. Councils really don’t need to involve themselves in this; the parent-child dyad has its own wisdom.

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