I have a child on the autism spectrum. There is something not normal with that kid, and I don’t mean poor parenting. I admit I only flipped through the video.
Did you know that something like 5% of little kids react adversely to Benadryl. Makes 'em really wired akin to the kid in the video. Do a Benadryl trial run if you’re a parent.
When my twins were 18 months old, they tag team cried, howled or screamed at least 10 hours of the 14 hour flight back to the US. For some of the time, they did a duet but most of the time they traded off. I stood up holding whichever was loudest the entire flight. it was miserable for my twins, for me and for the other passengers and I did all I could.
Once again, the kid didn’t just scream – he was running all over the place, climbing on things. And the mother didn’t even try to do anything, other than ask for the wi-fi to be turned on when she got on the plane, and later a half-hearted, “calm down, honey”.
What would happen if he knocked someone over, if he opened the overhead compartment and something fell out and hit him, or somebody else? If the plane hit turbulance? People seem to be ignoring that part.
Does anyone here speak German? If so, could you understand what the child was saying?
I’m going with the child having some kind of autistic spectrum disorder combined with little or no discipline, and I’m also wondering how a plane could take off without everyone being seated and belted in. He sure was fascinated with the plane’s ceiling.
If they HAD to travel, and couldn’t get some kind of medevac flight, in the future, this child should probably be heavily sedated. Really.
This is why kids under 5 or 6 should not be on planes. It is complete bullshit to subject a group of people who are already miserable from TSA, the baggage fees, and the lack of legroom to a screaming kid.
My guess is that she was returning to the US with a child she was adopting. He didn’t seem to be in the habit of looking to her for comfort or direction at all.
A friend of mine adopted a little boy from Romania, and he had a similar scream. It was not a communication, just as constant as breathing. Apparently it is not unusual with children who have not been properly loved and socialized.
In a case like that, all you can do is hold on to your seat and wait until you get home to normalize things for them. The actual trip home is going to be a constant state of over-stimulation, which is exactly how he struck me.
Crying kids are a part of life. As long as the parent is making a good-faith effort to deal with it, I’m fine with it. Assume there’s going to be noise on any flight and bring (or make) a pair of earplugs.
Just sell everything you’ve ever worked for and cash out your bank accounts, make a pile with the money, and set it on fire, because that’s what’s going to happen due to the psychiatric care (and often legal issues) these children will require for the rest of their lives.
My hot take is that the person who took/posted the video is being dishonest. We have nothing but his word for it that time and screaming are represented accurately.
Assuming the kid made even 10% of the disruption he’s represented to have made, then I’m with the people who say there’s something profoundly wrong with him.
Are we sure the video is real and not doctored up. I have been around my share of toddlers and I can’t say I have ever heard screaming like that except in a hospital ER. And never for 8 hours.
There was a kid in school with my daughter, he had serious developmental problems and did not speak. If you went to the school close to lunchtime you could hear him wailing like a sick animal. He was hungry. He was removed from his home because the family was sedating him and not feeding him at night. Sad situation. He quit wailing when he got on a normal feeding routine in his foster home.
There’s something odd about the time of this video. The video was posted on Aug 28, 2017. I just did a Google search on the words (with no quotation marks around anything):
Shane Townley child screams for eight hours
I get links to over a hundred news stories about the video. Every single one of them is no older than five days. Why did it take six months for any news outlet to write about this video?
This is exactly what I thought. I had a friend who did an international adoption of a little boy who was around three, spoke no English, and had never even been in an elevator, let alone a plane. 14 hour flight and he screamed the whole way and my friend said she was practically ready to jump out of the plane with him.
If he had spoken English, he probably would have been screaming “You’re not my mother!”
But it turned out he had some problems, including a pretty serious ear infection. And yes, some ongoing problems.
And those of you suggesting spanking the child. To stop him from crying? Do you really think that would work? “You are screaming so I will hurt you until you stop.” Uh huh.
The problem is it’s difficult to assess what actually happened because the video shows just bits and pieces and you don’t know what the mother was doing because you don’t see her. Obviously the guy was not going to film for 8 straight hours and he likely didn’t want the mother to see him videoing her child, so it makes sense why you don’t see much, but it just leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Where he edited to add hour one, etc. it seemed to repeat the same sequence for more than one of the hour tallies. Again, given the situation, it’s understandable, but people are jumping to specific conclusions without adequate info. That being said, that noise was grating beyond my last nerve and I would have been out of my mind even if it was only intermittent throughout the flight. I.m hoping that the parent intervened more than what was able to be seen on the video and she might have.
If you check the video, you’ll note that there is a vast difference between a crying child, and the screams/yells emitted from this child. You can definitely put up with a child who is crying, however loudly. What was filmed was a 'nother kettle of fish altogether.
I’ve got my doubts. Watch the video where he shows hour1, hour2, hour 3, etc. It’s different shots visually, but the audio track is one take. I taught emotionally disturbed kids for five years. This kid fits the pattern pretty well. Longest sustained screaming i ever saw was just under an hour. And the kids voice was affected for days.
Looks like parts of it happened, and i bet it was a hell of a flight. The author of the piece seems to have decided that this is the result of technology based on one comment from the mother pre take off. I’d like some other confirmation that this kid screamed for eight hours.
