Flying with kids has been the topic of three New York Times articles over the past few weeks (one, two and three), and the responses are predictably polarizing. Because yes, having a screaming kid on your flight absolutely sucks. I would imagine it also sucks to be the parent of a screaming kid on a flight, and the fact is that sometimes families need to travel too — leaving the baby at home is not a fair suggestion. So I’m pretty firmly in the camp of “cut parents and kids a lot of slack on airplanes.”
Which is why airlines really should make some reasonable accommodations for parents. Like, let families with small children board first, so that they don’t hold everyone else up. Seat parents and children together. Let parents stand with their kids at the back of the plane if the kids need to stretch their legs. Etc etc. At the same time, parents need to be realistic. And some of the parents in the Times article seem a little… clueless:
Surely they could spare a little milk, right?
But when John and Mary Rose Lin of Jersey City ran out of milk for their 18-month-old twins on a recent Continental flight from Newark to Maui, the flight attendant refused to give them more. That particular beverage, the Lins recall being told, was for coffee, not children. “I was not asking for a full bottle, just a cup,” said Mrs. Lin, noting that she even offered to pay for the milk.
It was the low point of an otherwise arduous trip. Her children are active, and efforts to allow them to move around the cabin were not welcomed by the plane’s staff. They were told to head back to their seats when they lingered near the rear galley; letting the children stretch their legs in the aisle was also not an option. “Not a lot of people sympathize with your situation,” said Mrs. Lin of the 12-hour ordeal. “If you feel like someone is going to help you, chances are no one will.”
Shocking that efforts to let “active” children move around the cabin and stretch their legs into the aisle were not welcomed by the plane’s staff. Have you been in a plane? The cabin is not large! The aisles are narrow, and passengers need to get to the bathroom, and flight attendants need to maneuver food and drink carts. I understand that’s an inconvenience, but it’s not one targeted at kids. Domestic air travel is the absolute worst, and U.S. airlines are almost universally awful, but the problem isn’t that airlines aren’t letting children run through the aisles. Of course, the staff definitely could have let the family hang out near the rear galley so the kids could stand — I also stretch my legs back there while I wait for the bathroom. But I wonder how long they were “lingering” before being told to go back to their seats. A few minutes of stretching seems fair; hanging out for an hour in a tight space that flight attendants need to use, and which is directly in the path to the bathroom, is maybe asking a lot. And it’s definitely unreasonable to expect that your kids should be able to hang out in already-tight airplane aisles. Yes, that sucks, but shared spaces are shared spaces.
At the same time, the hostility directed at traveling parents crosses the line well into the ridiculous:
“I, for one, would like priority boarding for free, special food for free, with special dispensation to scream, yell, run and joyously disturb my fellow high-fare, stressed-out, paying passengers without being hauled off the plane in handcuffs,” wrote Brian Barr, a frequent flier from Chicago, expressing his view of parental attitudes on planes. Families with small children, he went on, “should be charged EXTRA for all the havoc they inflict with their ‘Baby on Board’ entitlement attitude on the rest of full-fare paying society while traveling. Keep them home until they turn 7 or drive, oh selfish parents.”
Yes, it’s completely doable to just never let your kids on a plane until they’re 7 years old. And you can’t drive across an ocean, I don’t think.
Some travelers have suggested family sections on airplanes, and a lot of parents are on board:
A family-only section would give children and parents the freedom to “chat, watch Nickelodeon and laugh out loud,” read a recent post on Madame Noire, a blog catering to African-American women. “And yes, the kids can cry if they want to.”
After all, “do childless passengers really think it’s all gravy when parents can’t calm down their screaming child?” the post continued. “It’s just as stressful for the parent as it is for the child and the other passengers, but it’s a fact: kids cry.”
Yep. It is entirely unreasonable to expect that children will not cry on airplanes. Sorry, but you’re taking mass transportation, and you’re being transported in a way that does not allow parents to remove a crying child from the situation. I’d support family sections on airplanes, provided that those sections were voluntary and parents weren’t automatically shuttled to the back of the plane. And everyone has horror stories about That Horrible Kid On An Airplane — I’ve had my seat kicked for hours and my ears screamed in too, and I’ve seen parents who use the flight as an excuse to put on their noise-canceling headphones and zone out as their child terrorizes everyone around — but in my experience, the vast majority of parents are working extremely hard to keep their kids quiet and entertained. And it is not easy! But the deal with being in shared public spaces is (1) you try to be as unobtrusive and accommodating as is reasonable, and (2) you take steps to minimize how annoyed other people can make you. That goes for people traveling with children and people traveling without. I personally like this suggestion from Anya Clowers, a registered nurse and proprietor of JetWithKids.com:
“Everyone has to do their best to self-contain,” she said. For parents, that means anticipating your child’s needs, such as snacks, distractions and sleep. If your child is old enough, consider giving him or her a role during the flight, she said, such as official seat belt fastener. And inquire about sitting in the last row of the plane, where your child “won’t have as much of an audience,” should he or she act up.
The most important thing for parents to do is stay calm, said Mrs. Clowers, who says she has taken her 6-year-old son to 17 countries without incident. “Kids pick up on their parents’ stress,” she said. Avoid letting the hassles of air travel get to you, and you just might head off a tantrum.
That goes for childless travelers, too. “They need to respect that this may be someone’s family vacation, or someone may be going to their parents’ funeral,” Mrs. Clowers said.
So consider traveling with noise-canceling headphones, she advised, “and try to remember: plenty of business travelers are annoying, too.”
Girl, tell me about it.