Carol Lloyd at Salon’s Broadsheet posted a story the other day about a woman who’s suing Continental Airlines for kicking her family off a flight after some kind of altercation with the flight attendant over the flight attendant’s alleged suggestion that the woman’s son, who was repeating, “Bye bye plane” before takeoff, needed to shut up, and, when the mother asked what she was supposed to do, that “It’s called baby Benadryl.”
Now, I don’t know what happened on the flight, because I wasn’t there. Not to mention, we’re only getting the mother’s side of the story (including her appearance on Good Morning America with her son, who was so restless and making so much noise he had to be taken away from the interview). We really can’t tell, from the mother’s account, just how she objected to the alleged suggestion of Benadryl (and from experience, I’m guessing that this is where things went all pear-shaped, since these kinds of accounts usually leave out crucial details like that. Which is why you usually hear about them when the complaint is filed and not after more details have come out during discovery and the case is settled).
What I want to talk about is Lloyd’s post at Broadsheet, because it irritates the fuck out of me. After recounting the Continental story (casting it as “mother kicked off flight for refusing to drug her child”), Lloyd continues:
Bring on the child haters, the airline critics, the lazy parenting theorists! If you think this story sounds like an urban legend designed to foment sippy-cup culture wars, I don’t blame you. I too would have found it difficult to swallow had I not experienced a similar treatment on an airline just last month. The details are tedious — they involve me tapping the flight attendant on the shoulder trying to pass along some trash, him informing me he didn’t appreciate “being touched,” and me asking why he was being so rude. He then snarled at me: “Your children are totally out of control! If you’d just discipline them, you’d be much better off.”
Right. Because anyone who gets irritated by screaming kids on airplanes must be a child-hater. It gets better, though:
Granted, my kids often give an unfortunate impression given that they both look two years older than they are, but definitely act their age. In public situations, I’ve been known to whisper, hiss, threaten, cover a screaming mouth, and take away beloved privileges until I’m literally dripping with sweat. But this wasn’t one of those occassions. When the flight attendant — a young man who I assumed had no children – told me off, both children were sitting absolutely silent, enraptured by a Hello Kitty DVD. Perhaps something had happened while I was in the bathroom and they were with my husband, I’ll never know. After the event, I had 20 more hours of traveling to soul-search. Perhaps my children are monsters and I would never really be able to see it. Maybe in the wake of 9/11, flying and the jobs of flight attendants had become too stressful and high anxiety for them to be able to deal with squirmy passengers with squeaky voices or anything out of the ordinary. (Do a search for “kicked off airplane” and you get all sorts of stories about American flights dumping passengers for virtually nothing: a coughing fit, a political T-shirt, for a father asking if a pilot is sober.)
How much do you want to bet that “a young man who I assumed had no children” is code for “gay”? Moreover, having no children does not mean “child-hater,” nor does not wanting children, nor does wanting adult-only spaces where adults are free to act like, you know, adults.
It seems that the final parenthetical gets at a lot more than does simply dismissing the flight attendant as a child hater, though Lloyd doesn’t bother to explore it. It’s no longer the glamorous days of air travel when flying was a rare and special thing, and the flight attendants are under tremendous pressure from the airlines, from security, from the air marshals, and from passengers pissed off about service cuts, delays, squashed conditions, weird smells, no food, yadda yadda. And they don’t get paid a whole hell of a lot, either.
Seems to me both stories have less to do with hating children than with a flight attendant who’s had a bad fucking day.
I will say something here: whenever I see the whole childed/childfree debate rearing its ugly head, parents are very quick to dismiss the stories of the childfree (or even the childed who like to go out without kids from time to time) of kids misbehaving in restaurants or movies or what have you: “Oh, I’ve never seen anything like that. It must not happen.”
I suppose this is where I say the same: I’ve never seen anything like that happen, either. Most people shuffle onto the plane, get in their seats, zone out for the duration, and shuffle off. Kids scream, but usually at takeoff and landing, when everyone understands that they have problems because they can’t equalize the air pressure. But I’m not going to conclude that just because I’ve never seen it happen doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen.
And certainly Lloyd wants her experiences to count as evidence in the “sippy-cup wars.” Here’s mine: I took Southwest during law school to get from Chicago to Seattle for my brother’s wedding. It was cheap, and it was my first time on Southwest. However, it involved four legs and two planes and all day: Chicago to Kansas City, KC to Las Vegas with a change of plane, Vegas to Salt Lake City, SLC to Seattle. The planes all had two sets of rows where the seats faced each other, one row facing backwards and one forwards, at the bulkhead and in the emergency row. Somehow I got the brilliant idea to sit backwards the whole way. I sat in the emergency row for the first three legs, and of course kids can’t sit there. I had a good time (my favorite leg was KC to Vegas, when a couple of sod farmers from KC got on and sat in our row, which totally entranced the two retirees from Chicago who were heading to Vegas to gamble and play golf. I learned a lot about grass that day, which I have yet to apply). There were trivia games, and I won drinks. Whee! But flying all damn day with only cookies and peanuts to eat kind of wears on you, so I decided to move up to the bulkhead backwards seat in SLC so I could get off first. And suddenly, the row filled up with a couple, another woman and three or four kids. The woman across from me changed her kid’s poopy diaper right there since she was afraid she’d lose her seat otherwise. The little girl next to me had just turned two (though how the airline knew, I’ll never know) and so she couldn’t sit on Daddy’s lap anymore. She was not happy about this, and screamed at the top of her fucking lungs the entire. fucking. flight. And then she threw up on me during the landing.
So will I look askance at kids on a flight? Yes, I will. Do I hate them or think they don’t deserve to be there? No. In fact, that one flight was the very worst experience I’ve ever had with a kid on a flight, and I’ve never seen or heard anything close to it since. Certainly, I’m a lot more tolerant of screaming kids on airplanes than in restaurants or at the movies: you can’t take a screaming kid off an airplane midflight, and they’ve got legitimate reason to scream during at least part of the flight (more, if they have an ear infection or cold — I flew not too long ago with the flu, and that was all kinds of miserable). Seat-kickers are another story.
But then there’s the conclusion:
Obviously suggesting that a child be medicated goes far beyond any rational response to a chatty 19-month-old no matter how repetitive he was being. (Baby Benadryl can be a beautiful thing, but it’s a parent’s prerogative to use it, not a flight attendant’s place to demand it.) But according to many of the readers of this story who are sick and tired of “obnoxious booger eating” animals disturbing their peace, she did the right thing. Now let’s be clear; most of the posters sympathize with Penland, whether they have kids or not. But for a certain child-free percentage of the population, ordinary kid behavior is so reprehensible as to warrant turning around flights and creating child-free restaurants.
One of these things is not like the other. Like I said above, screaming on a flight is normal; screaming in a restaurant is not, because a child can be removed from a restaurant, where there is no change in air pressure causing legitimate discomfort. If a child is screaming in a non-family restaurant, it is the height of rudeness for the parent to expect everyone else to just deal with the behavior. If a child is screaming on an airplane because the pressure hurts, it’s the height of rudeness to demand that the child stop (it is not, however, the height of rudeness to demand the child stop kicking your seatback. That shit’s annoying, and unconnected to air pressure).
But wishing for childfree restaurants — wishing for *any* childfree space — is not exactly the same thing as turning around a flight for “ordinary kid behavior.” If, in fact, that was what happened — something tells me it wasn’t “ordinary kid behavior” at the root of the issue but adult behavior.
Mind you, I don’t think a whole lot of Carol Lloyd ever since her post entitled “Chubby child, future hootchie mama?” in which she had this to say about her daughter:
I’m not too proud to admit that reports that a study found excess weight in preschoolers could lead to early puberty had me eyeing my naturally chubby 3-year-old daughter with some anxiety. Would she be one of those 9-year-olds sauntering through the elementary school halls sporting a brazen teenage glare, a bra and a purse stuffed with tampons?
Well, and one thing a lot of defensive parents do is make this about the kids. Like our karaoke DJ said, kids are great. It’s the parents that are the problem. What makes people irate is when a kid is behaving in such a way that kids do, and the parents don’t take normal measures to control the kid. I don’t mind if a baby cries during a movie; I do mind if you don’t take the baby out. I don’t mind a kid kicking my seat a couple times. I mind it if the parent doesn’t stop him.
Yeah, I did aviation law for a couple of years, and I can tell you it probably wasn’t the kid’s behavior that got those people kicked off the plane. It was probably the parent’s reaction to being told the kid’s behavior was bothering other people.
That, and people get really emotionally attached to their baggage.
Another thing — Lloyd talks about the happy smiling flight attendants on Lufthansa. Well, Lufthansa (as I know from working at the firm that represented them in the US) is partially state-owned. So they’re not going to have the economic pressure that the US airlines are under.
Employees not under economic pressure tend to be happy and smiling and accommodating employees.
I’m with Chopper Read on this.
I’m pretty much at the point where I skip Carol Lloyd’s posts. They’ve all got this preemptive “Well, excuse me for not thinking like the sheeple!” kind of vibe which I can’t stand.
Also, I have more than a sneaking suspicion that the mother’s story is not the whole story. (Of course, there is the whole thing about the flight attendant with the Xanax, so maybe it’s not completely implausible.)
I see a lot of hard-charging parents who just don’t want their limited time with their kids Spoiled by the unpleasantness of saying No to the little darling, and believe me, they will pay for it down the road, not that doing the dirty work isn’t damn unpleasant right there on the spot. I also see a fair number whose little darlings are actually acting out mom and dad’s hostility/territoriality/power issues, and those parents will pay later too (by me, not enough for the damage they’re doing to their kids, but still a whole lot).
All that said, and granted I have a remarkably low-maintenance kid, if a flight attendant demanded that I drug my child I would make it my business to have her fired.
I’d like to think that if the flight attendant had succeeded in pressuring the mother to give the kid Benadryl, the kid probably would have had the same reaction my niece did, which was to become MORE hyper and disruptive. It’s a pretty common side effect with antihistamines and kids.
I think there IS a subset of people in the world who think that children shouldn’t be allowed to speak or exist. I mean, wasn’t the argument that this kid was talking in a normal voice and saying goodbye to something? (The plane?)
Yeah, and I’m annoyed when the businessman next to me spends as much time as he can on the phone, and when he then turns to his companion and bitches about the people in the office, but you know what I don’t get to do? Tell his mommy to drug him so that his conversation doesn’t bother me. That’s out of line.
I had to stop reading Broadsheet because of this kind of thing. They do get a good feminist or woman-friendly angle on a story, but a large portion of the time the resulting article props up all sorts of misogynist or just plain ugly stereotypes. My favorite was a post about how awful it was that a magazine called some celebrity fat, because she wasn’t actually fat — as if it would be totally OK to slag on actual fatties.
They just seem to miss the point a great deal of the time.
I have two boys and have used Benedryl for, um… , not its intended purpose (e.g., to have a quiet road trip). But I doubt I’d ever drug a 2-year-old for saying bye-bye and I would be really irritated if someone suggested it. That said, it sounds like the whole thing could have been avoided by some common sense on the side of the flight attendant and/or the mom. At that age, children are fairly easy to distract from whatever they are focused on at that moment. It sounds like it became less about how to get the kid to stop and more about a battle of the wills between the two adults. I wonder how quickly after the mom and flight attendant locked horned did the kid stop–and I wonder if anyone noticed at that point.
Having just spent yesterday flying Southwest from Seattle back to Austin with my two sons, ages 9 and 5, I have some experience from which to speak about airlines and kids. For one thing, why on Earth do airlines cut off early boarding at age 4? (Also, United recently assigned me and my husband seats on one row and our sons seats on another, five rows up. That’s brilliant. Luckily their seat companion was understanding and changed places with me.) Southwest is reasonable if you ask to board in the early group so you can get seats together, but it’s a nightmare if you can’t do that.
Also, the point about Benadryl sometimes causing kids to get much more hyper is true. I’ve found the portable DVD to be the best solution to restless kids on the plane. (For the No TV crowd out there, desparate times make for desparate measures.) I also pack snacks, water bottles to fill at the fountain, coloring books, anything that could distract them during flight. (The older boy has a GameBoy. I hated the damn thing until I saw what it could do to a kid on an airplane.) Still, even as prepared as I am, there are still delays, turbulence, being cramped, the whole horrid misery.
Coming back from Seattle this time, we had two planes and three stops, Seattle to Reno to Phoenix, where we changed planes, to Austin. Luckily the boys fell asleep on the last leg, after the DVD battery ran out. Still, it could have been much, much worse. In fact, writing this has made me decide that the best solution to this problem is to agitate for more passenger trains.
I am so sorry to have been introduced to this web site by Pandagon. There are plenty of people who openly hate children - orientation has nothing to do with it. And guess what, most of them do not have childern. Being child-free does not make one anti-child. Telling someone to drug their child into compliance _does_.
The WORST traveling experiences I have ever had involve drunken men. Kids have nothing on drunks in the air. But, of course, they are easier to belittle and bully.
I take it the other people posting haven’t flown lately.
I really doubt that the only thing the kid was doing was saying “bye-bye” quietly. This is, after all, a complaint in a lawsuit, where the mother has an interest in making the facts look good for her.
But yeah, I’m in agreement that the real dispute was between the adults.
I’m sorry, too.
Right, because if someone doesn’t agree with you, they must not have flown lately.
Karen, I’ve flown lately, I have a lot of experience flying with an infant/toddler, and I have no idea what you’re responding to. You seem to be indignantly refuting something I don’t think anyone’s said, and you did it rudely.
I really don’t think this is the best way to advocate for children.
Karen Smith, that is (just realized there were two)
Well, *I* can’t wait to get on a plane tonight.
Karen…
We once had an issue where the airlines booked my then-3-year-old son on a different PLANE for a nonstop flight from Hawaii to New Jersey. No amount of reasoning with the agent could convince her that my child should fly on the same airplane as me and his dad. So finally, I just said, “Well, at least I’ll have a quiet flight… not sure about my son’s rowmates but I’m sure you know best.”
New seats were assigned immediately and we all flew on the same plane.
“I really doubt that the only thing the kid was doing was saying “bye-bye” quietly.”
I thought the whole thing was about the fact he was saying “bye bye plane”… which the flight attendant said was making some passengers nervous (in terms of planes going bye-bye from terrorist attacks). I didn’t think this issue was about a misbehaved/loud child so much as a child who unknowingly used a very unfortunate choice of words in the wrong environment? From there, it sounds like it escalated… which gets back to the behavior of the adults.
Yeah. I’m sorry, if anyone ever got nervous because a three year old was repeating “bye bye plane” I wouldn’t suggest that the three year old be tranquilized. What if the three year old kept having to use the bathroom on the flight ZOMG MAKING A BOMB IN TEH LAVATORIEZ!!!1!!one!!!
About the whole “making the other passengers nervous” thing …
I travel a fair amount on business. I flew weeks after 9/11. It has been six years. It’s time to get over it.
The plane is not going to blow up because a small child says something that only sounds sinister to paranoid adults. People praying in the back of the plane are not going to blow the plane up. Several Arabs sitting together are not planning to blow the plane up. Terrorist attacks in the US are, actually, really, really rare. And if you happen to be on the one plane that is downed by terrorist attack, none of the otherwise unremarkable shit you think you notice is really a clue; it will happen without apparent warning and there is nothing you can do about it. Sit down, shut up, and if you can’t control your irrational fears, see a doctor. I hear Xanax works wonders; and if that doesn’t work, take two Ambien and sleep through the landing.
I am so sick of one highly coordinated terrorist attack being used as an excuse for people’s anxieties and bigotries.