May you forever be cursed to be seated next to a colicky 14-month old with leaky, cloth diapers.
Asshole.
<b>Bond</b>, have you ever been around infants? They cry often and sometimes it’s very difficult to get them to stop. Sure, sometimes they’re hungry or thirsty or need their diaper changed. But sometimes it’s something else, and since they can’t talk, it’s harder to figure out what it is. I agree with you that older little kids can be obnoxious, kicking people’s seats (especially when they’re sent alone on a flight and there’s no parent to control them and the FA caters to all their needs without reprimanding). Those kinds of kids are more controllable, but the crying infants are not. You can’t tell a screaming infant to shut up and expect them to do so.
So, sure, if it’s convenient for you to leave them with the grandparents, fine. That wouldn’t be convenient for me if I have kids. I’m in St Louis and my parents are in Boston, my bf’s mother is in FL. And kids aren’t like dogs who have kennels you can take them to.
Plus, while the kids may not appreciate it quite as much as the adults, I do think that it is good for them to travel. That age is the best to start learning a foreign language (from birth actually), and just being around it can help their brain to get used to thinking that way. And what’s more, they get exposed to different cultures from the getgo and will perhaps therefore be more open later on (this depends largely on the parents attitudes too).
And the back pedaling begins.
You initially said
**
**
oooh look at me…I can chum the waters with a juicy kid rant…and then when called on it, back away like a 747 from the gate.
Impressive commentary. :dubious:
BondJamesBond, you have come out in favor of criminal assault on infants and children. You have no credibility.
BondJamesBond – did it ever occur to you that, despite every thing a parent does, the kid may scream anyway?
As someone who has tended a young child on a long flight, and tried everything I could to appease the child and try to get them to sleep or at least be quiet, and nothing worked:
Fuck.
You.
Idiot.
Oh, and in your drunken idiot analogy-it would be okay to potentially poison said drunken idiot?
:rolleyes:
:dubious: :dubious:
I hate misbehaving kids, and crying kids on flights. While I don’t think he should have given the kid a prescription drug like that, the mother sure as hell should have calmed her kid down. I’m NOT saying the kid deserved it, but hell, if I’d been a passenger on the flight I would have been glad if the kid had just shut up.
The worst kid I’ve ever seen didn’t cry. He was probably about 4. I’ve flown since that age and always managed to remain in my seat and calm the entire time. I haven’t cried, whined, kicked seats, etc. Most of the times the flights were from PHL to Orlando, so there was no movie or in-flight programming, yet somehow I endured. Anyway, back to the point, this kid climbed up over the back of his chair and fell into my lap, then, after being replaced in his seat by me, crawled under his seat and came up at my feet. Where were his parents, you ask? Sitting across the aisle and ignoring him. Not once did they acknowledge that his behavior might be impairing my comfort or enjoyment of the flight. They were on vacation. NEWS FLASH: SO WAS I!!! You inconsiderate assholes, both of you. Don’t you teach your children how to behave?! These are the kids that should be drugged, or better yet tied and gagged and stowed in the overhead compartments.
Parents, if your kid doesn’t have the patience for a flight, don’t take them. You have a myriad of alternatives in this country: drive in a private automobile, take the bus, take a train, sail there, or JUST DON’T GO.
And, BTW FaerieBeth, I don’t care how intellectual your kids are, at 19 months no child appreciates an international vacation. I mean not a single child on earth. I dont’ want you stupid yuppy parents telling me how smart your kids are. I know they are 19 months old, and so I know they can’t appreciate it. End of case.
Way to go, Bond, for sticking up for airline passengers everywhere. While it was not included in the Airline Passenger’s Bill of Rights, it should have been: Thou Shalt Not Have To Put Up With Sickeningly Ill-Mannered Children. I understand your harshly-worded post is merely a reaction to the whiners on this board sticking up for their rugrats.
I’ve had incredible ear pain on planes. Enough that I felt crippled. If a kid if feeling that, even the most competent parent could not make him quiet. That sort of thing is unpredictable.
I know crying or disruptive kids are a nuisance. They do not compare, however, to a large lurching drunk who voluntarily turned himself into a hazard by overindulging in alcohol. Nor do these children deserve being drugged by a serious medicine not approved for humans their age.
I don’t care how much you loathe kids on an airplane… how can any rational person disagree with that second paragraph.
My friend travels first class, WITH her kids. If she wants to spend $4000 to ride up where there’s room and good service with her two toddlers, well, the airlines seem okay with that. If you don’t like the airlines’ policy of “any kid whose family can pay for a seat can sit wherever s/he wants,” take a boat.
What, that’s not a practical solution? Well neither is it a good solution for parents of young children. They aren’t all going to see the parthenon.
If I had kids and hopefully it never happens I’d do what I did for my cat when we moved to FL from MA I gave him a seditive perscribed by my vet. Hey I’ve been the overly obnoxious kid on a plane and I tell you I did not like flying I cried and screamed and kicked because I did not feel good. If my mother would have given me something to make me sleep the whole flight through I think me and every other passenger on the plane would have been grateful.
I’m sure though that if some one else was to do that my mom or even me if I had kids would have proably killed the person who did it.
Cranky, are you talking about the second paragraph of your post ? If so, which sentence could no rational person disagree with, the first or the second ?
Except that a child isn’t a cat. Tranquilizing a child for the purpose of keeping him quiet for the convenience of a parent really isn’t a good idea. Aside from the physiological dangers of giving a drug that’s intended for adults, it’s hardly fair to the child.
A friend of mine tried to do that for her (IIRC) 2-year-old son during a longish plane flight. The child ended up sleeping through two meals and, on arrival, had a rather nasty diaper rash from not being changed. When he came out of the active sleep, he was still pretty logy for most of the rest of the day. I don’t know if there were long-term effects, but I would not be comfortable allowing my son to be that sedated for my own convenience.
Robin
I’d actually rather deal with a drunk person. Nothing puts me into a debilitating migraine faster than a screaming little kid. The noise they make and the pitch they reach is, quite honestly, painful to my ears. It actually, really, physically hurts.
On a flight (nonstop) from Pittsburgh to Phoenix, there were two little kids that both looked about 3 years old. One of them sat quietly through the entire six hour flight and never caused a problem. The other one screamed, wailed and ran around like a wild animal climbing on people and howling at the top of his lungs while his parents did absolutely nothing to stop him. The flight attendants and other passengers asked these parents several times to keep the kid under control, but they brushed it off with ‘kids will be kids’.
Believe it or not, listening to the screaming and wailing of a small kid is not the benign experience it’s being made out to be. It’s even worse when it’s giving you a migraine and you’re trapped in a tiny space with the noise-maker that you cannot get out of. No, not everyone is going to look sympathetically at the kid and feel sorry for it because the parents haven’t figured out what’s causing the screaming and stop it. Some of us are going to sit there with our migraine, shaking and nauseous and hoping we don’t puke.
So if your kid can’t be quiet on the plane, they don’t belong on the plane. Don’t expect the rest of the world to put themselves out to the same degree that you do because ‘kids scream and wail’.
Dudn’t matter, although I meant the latter two sentences. I suppose a rational person could disagree that crying kids are annoying (perhaps a deaf rational person, heh). But I would like to think most people would agree that kids aren’t the same as adult drunks, and that no one should be drugged against their will with substances that aren’t proven safe.
It’s important to realize that not everyone is traveling for the same reasons that you are traveling: just because you are on vacation dosen’t mean that everyone else is traceling for pleasure. In my experience, people with muliple small children usually can’t afford to travel casusally by plane, and I suspect that a pretty high perentage ofthe people you see like that are responding to some emergency. When I am faced with a situation like that I tend to assume that the unreponsive parent is thinking something like “I’m flying home as fast as I can to deal with my mother who had a sudden, unexpected stroke and isn’t expected to live through the night. I could care fuck-all if the baby’s crying is annoying.” Of course this isn’t a good attitude: life is never an excuse for rudeness. But the possibility that other people simply have bigger things on their minds and their own load of pain and misery to bear makes it easier on me. You own milage may, of course, vary.
And some supposed emergency on the part of someone with kids means that regardless of the reason single, childless me is traveling, I have to just understand that I’m going to have to put up with the screaming, wailing, shrieking and running around?
Regardless of what ‘bigger things’ they have on their minds, they ought to consider that there are more people than them on that plane who may be headed to the bedside of a family member who’s going to die.
The noise gives me a migraine, making me very sick in addition to whatever stress/pain put me on an airplane. It’s not a failing on my part to be annoyed or otherwise made uncomfortable by someone else’s rude behavior. But it is a failing on their part not to refrain from being an inconsiderate jerk, regardless of what’s on their mind.
True dat, Cat:cool:
Has it occurred to no-one else that, if you can’t stand being cooped up with a large and random assortment of fellow humans in all their irritating and unpredictable glory, maybe you should be the one taking the boat/ bus/ train/ whatever instead of flying?
Hmm, I didn’t think they had this problem in Canada, but I guess I was wrong. Here in America, Viking, we like to respect other people. Americans are trained from a very early age to wait in lines for amusement park attractions, movies, boarding an airplane, etc. We also respect people when we are forced into tight quarters with them: we wear deodorant, etc. to prevent from smelling foul, we make polite conversation if any at all (so as not to irritate/bother/intrude on the privacy of the other person). Somehow, from a very young age, I have grasped this code of conduct. I credit my parents.
Other children, as this thread has made abundantly clear, do not grasp this. Why? I blame their parents. If I were ever to step out of line and misbehave, my parents were quick to reprimand me with a reminder or explanation of why my behavior was unacceptable. Other parents hide behind the excuse “kids will be kids,” which turns into “teens today” and then finally blossoms in the form of “today’s young adults!”
If you or your children are unable to comply with the expectations of American society when you travel, please dont’ fly. And don’t make excuses for the fools who do fly with beligerant children.