"Flight Is Canceled After a Child Refuses to Be Seated"

[TokyoBayer]

@Spice_Weasel

But it’s not anything like restraining an adult, you have to be forceful without injuring the child and that’s very difficult because you don’t really know what a reasonable amount of force is.

Oh, a lot of parents who advocate spanking or applaud when others do don’t particularly care if the child gets hurt.

I grew up in the era when abusing kids was common. Children got hurt.

@Spice_Weasel

I mean there’s your answer right there. Aaron’s parents were enabling his behavior

Exactly. There is a world of difference between overly permissive parenting and authoritative parenting where you set rules and limits but not blindly.

This is the problem that the fanboys of authoritarian parenting don’t understand. If they only see anything but the strictest punishment for the slightest failure of children to immediately jump when the parents speak, they take it as a personal affront.

I’ve never understood their need to go out of their way to be offended by other people’s choices, and hence the desire to applaud when they see a child get smacked.

[madmonk28]

@Mallard

When I hear about situations like this, I really do wonder.

You mean when you hear about a small regional flight in another country that is disrupted, you wonder if maybe employing child beating should be employed in your country even though there is overwhelming data that it is not effective?

[Spiderman]

@ASL_v2.0

If not, that would seem to go a long way to resolving the logistical challenge, such as it may be, of ensuring adequate harnesses are on hand for any given flight.

Also, seriously… what if s kid spills something on a harness? IDK, what if a kid spills something on their sestbelt?

Parent A leaves it in the seat pocket
Parent B leaves it in the overhead bin - that plane makes three more flights that day. If someone catches it at the end of the day, which flight was it from; especially if two of those four flights had a toddler using one.
Parent C carries it off & gives it to the gate agent, who because they’re busy with a line of people queueing up for the next outbound flight tosses it in a bin under their kiosk, where they promptly forget about it in the chaos of rebooking a bunch of people because of some weather delay. Two days later, someone finds it but doesn’t know if it belongs at that airport or should be returned to a different one, & if so, which one. What if it’s sn air line like Frontier that only flies to a given city twice a week; they now need to store it & remember to pull it out for Tuesday’s flight back to ___

As for cleaning, there is a crew that cleans the aircraft regularly, mostly just trash pickup, but then can do more, if necessary. What they can’t do is clean something that isn’t there. Air sickness is common enough that they put puke bags in the seatback pockets. A toddler probably can’t reach them on their own. Additionally, a chest or shoulder strap is closer to one’s nose than a lap belt is, meaning something that smells will be much more noticeable in the harness than a lap belt.

[RickJay]

@Beckdawrek

I could change an attitude with a private walk. Of course you cannot do that taxi-ing down a runway.

Like I said preparedness is key. Teach the child to act right at home and you can expect them to carry that out every where else, barring unforeseen circumstances (illness, pain, overtired)

If this child is neuro-typical there’s got to be a way to reason. Even the terrible 2yo can be bribed. (You will never reason with a 2yo.)

I don’t see how you’re adding any information to this discussion.

Yes, kids can almost always be controlled. Everyone knows that. This is a weird event as evidenced by the fact that it’s the only example of it happening ANYONE CAN THINK OF.

Parents generally do a great job controlling their kids and really do try. This incident is not evidence to the contrary, even in this specific case, as we don’t know why this happened.

[puzzlegal]

@BigT

I know the logic for busses is that they are big enough that their mass prevents the sorts of injuries you’d see in a smaller vehicle, and thus passive protection is sufficient. School busses I always noticed had very padded seats, front and back, and only the driver really is in enough danger to wear a seat belt.

School buses now mostly have belts, because that is cheap, and it makes parents feel better. Also, it’s arguably good in encouraging good seatbelt habits in kids.

Airplanes are like buses on the runway. During landing (and maybe takeoff) the belts hold passengers in their seats, reducing the odds they will be thrown someplace awkward in a crash and then have trouble exiting. Flight attendants (who have to be in good enough shape after a minor crash to open the doors and herd everyone else off) usually sit backwards, which is safer, and usually wear shoulder harnesses as well as lap belts. The belts also prevent passengers from being thrown against the ceiling during extreme turbulence events, and from being sucked out of windows and other holes during extremely rare hull failures. Once the plane is in the air, belting loosely gives you about 98% of the value of belting firmly (until landing, of course).

Given the ratio of adult flyers to toddlers, and also the relative fragility of adult passengers (toddlers are tough and flexible) I’m certain there’d be a greater increase in safety by fitting shoulder harnesses for the adults as compared to offering better harnesses for toddlers. It would probably cost less, too, as there wouldn’t be any expensive per-flight logistics, it would just be a one time cost per jet to upgrade the belts. That it hasn’t been done suggests the experts don’t think it’s a very valuable upgrade. Part of the cost would be that it’s less comfortable to wear – a cost that i suspect is higher for toddlers than for adults.

[slash2k]

@Beckdawrek

Teach the child to act right at home and you can expect them to carry that out every where else, barring unforeseen circumstances (illness, pain, overtired)

The problem in this very instance appears to be unforeseen circumstances: a toddler who was overtired, perhaps overstimulated, and for whatever reason terrified of what was happening.

[chela]

@Spiderman

What happens when a family doesn’t return one, or flies out on Airline A but returns on Airline B which means two airlines have them on one-way flights & not in their original location

That’s a good point. Maybe the airlines would handle it the way they handle giving out amenities that are intended to be reused. Blankets, pillows, headphones (reusable) are handed out upon request. If a passenger drools, barfs or leaks on the item, what happens to it? Or like you said it’s not retuned, they stuff it in their bag and take it with them, now no blankets, or pillows are left on that aircraft for the next passenger that requests it. I’m sure it happens.

[Spiderman]

My guess is that they are resupplied when the plane is at a hub airport & they’re not keeping a stash at every rinky-dink little city they fly to so on any given flight you may be SoL if you want a blanket or pillow but that particular plane will be restocked with them in the next day or two when it’s in it’s hub city.

That brings up another point. What if the family is flying from a small city & has a connecting flights; especially across different partner airlines. Should they take the harness with them for both or all three flights in their journey or leave it on each plane & hope to get another one on the next plane? Especially if travelling internationally.

[Beckdawrek]

We really don’t have any idea what the issue was.

We’re are guessing.

So if I may speculate further: there is a hold you can do where toddler is on your lap face forward. Your hand on the kids forehead and other hand holding the wrists and hug tightly.

There is the feet you gotta watch for. I’ve had to do this with my girls for injections or dental procedure. They soon caught on if they were still it went faster.

Are kids under a certain age still allowed to be lap sitters on flights?

[slash2k]

We do have an eyewitness who told the CBC (link upthread in #33) :

Passenger Aryeh Kozuch says there was definitely “a lot of frustration,” but the child wasn’t being bratty or uncontrollable — rather, they were very scared.

“They just kept hiding under their seat. If they got forced into [being] strapped in, they just kind of slid out underneath.”

A lap infant must be under the age of two; the child is only described as a “toddler” in most of the articles, but the fact the parent(s) paid for a separate seat in which they kept trying to buckle the child at least suggests the kid was two or three years old, at which point it would be illegal for the plane to take off with kiddo in somebody’s lap.

[susan]

Planes can provide seatbelt extenders for larger people. I assume they’d use the same procedures. Or, require children of a certain age to be accompanied by a plane-ready car seat.

[gdave]

I realize it’s likely no one cares, but for anyone who remembers me, no, I’m not returning to regular participation on this board, but, yes, I still lurk here on occasion, and no, that’s not healthy, but that’s a different issue.

(I realize it’s likely no one cares, but for anyone who remembers me, no, I’m not returning to regular participation on this board, but, yes, I still lurk here on occasion, and no, that’s not healthy, but that’s a different issue.) (For some reason this stupid board interpreted my first attempt at this parenthetical comment as “math” and put it in funk formatting that I can’t figure out how to edit away, so I’m editing it in again. Sigh.)

@Spice_Weasel: Thank you for posting in this thread about your experiences with your son. I hope that some who read your posts have learned something. But selfishly, your posts also make me feel better. It’s heart-rending to read about your son’s struggles. But it’s heart-warming to read about how you’re both dealing with them. With all the shit going on in the world, and some of the shitty posts in this thread, it really makes me feel better about the world knowing that your son has you. You’re a good mom.

Obviously, your son and I are different people. And it sounds like he’s dealing with very different issues and struggles than I dealt with growing up. But not *completely* different. I can really identify with some of his struggles with emotional dysregulation. It took my own parents, and some of the “experts” and “professionals” who worked with us, a while to get to the kinds of approaches and techniques that you seem to be starting with.

Treating my meltdowns as a discipline issue caused lasting damage to me. It also just didn’t *work*. It wasn’t actually *useful*. Setting clear and consistent *behavioral* boundaries with clear and consistent consequences was *useful*. Also, “timeouts” may not have been “efficient”, but they were *useful*. Well, using them as punishments to exclude, ostracize, and humiliate me (as a couple of teachers but not my parents did) wasn’t. But giving me the time and space to safely process and self-regulate was *useful*. Telling me when I got upset that I was “over-reacting”, that “it’s not that big a deal”, that I was “too sensitive”, wasn’t *useful*. Telling me that it was OK to be upset, but it wasn’t OK to break things or lash out at other people, was *useful*.

Corporal punishment also wasn’t *useful*, even for actual misbehavior. The idea that it was OK for someone bigger and stronger than me to forcibly hold me down and intentionally inflict pain on me, and I was supposed to just take it, and *appreciate* it as being “for my own good”, just never made any sense at all to me. Still doesn’t. I’d hide, plead, struggle, even fight back. And that kind of punishment didn’t actually make a difference with my behavior.

I don’t have any memories from when I was a toddler, but from what I can remember about what my parents told me, I don’t think started having meltdowns until I was a bit older. But even when I was older and would have been better able to understand what was going on, trying to spank me out of a meltdown or trying to buckle me into a harness to restrain me while I was having one would not have gone well for anyone involved. I really don’t want to imagine someone trying that with a toddler experiencing a meltdown or panic attack.

Anyway, again, @Spice_Weasel, I really want to thank you for your posts in this thread. I really do feel better about the world knowing folks like you and your son are in it.

[Spice_Weasel]

Gosh, thank you. It’s a lot of work and it’s meaningful to have someone recognize it. My parents did not deal well with my ADHD and I just wanted to be ahead of this for my son so that he didn’t get answers when he was 37 and have to wonder what it would have been like to get support from the beginning. But remaining calm while your kid has a meltdown is no easy feat. I have had to unlearn a lot of disciplinary notions from my childhood - not even the abuse, but the “because I say so” mentality that does NOT work for my son. So much of the standard parental script has to be thrown out with neurodiverse kids. And people will judge you for it. But let’s see the result in twenty years and I’ll bet it’s going to be better than the authoritarian bullshit I grew up with.

I credit a lot to the other parents of neurodiverse kids on this board who have helped to keep me sane and to stay the course even when I feel like I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

[DesertDog]

@Spice_Weasel

Hitting kids makes them more aggressive.

Reminds me of a cartoon I saw in a psychology text. A little girl is crying and papa has her older brother across his knee with hand upraised. This will teach you to hit your little sister!

[Just_Asking_Questions]

@BigT

School busses I always noticed had very padded seats, front and back,

Not when I was a wee lad. Our buses had light padding and bare metal exposed tubing for seat structure. All out there to bash your forehead or teeth in a bump or hard stop.

[puzzlegal]

That’s true, but research since then has shown that padding the seats is the most effective way to reduce traffic injuries to kids on the bus.

[Just_Asking_Questions]

Indeed. Replacement buses all had padding.