Briefly, parents could not get a toddler under control and in her seat so that a plane could take off, so they were thrown off the plane. Apparently, the kid was climbing under the seats and “hitting the parents”.
I was on the fence about this until I saw a filmed interview with the parents. The girl was a large, robust and hyper three year old, and she was climbing vigorously all over her seated mom while wearing hard shoes. The mom sat there blandly, the very picture of benign passivity. I think I’ve been on a plane with a few of these families.
The news anchors following the filmed interview went on to state that the airline had received many e-mails after the event, 92% of which backed the airline for their action.
On top of showing some backbone, the airline also reimbursed them for the tickets AND gave them free tickets to use another time. They went out of their way to be accommodating to the family, who, as far as I can tell, are being jerks about it.
And I say that as the parent of two. If the parents can’t get their shit together for 15 minutes before take-off, there’s no way they’re going to keep her and the other passengers safe for hours in the air. The problem, as outlined by that article, isn’t that the kid was crying, it’s that she wasn’t in her seat. I’m sorry, but if you want to fly, you sit in the seat. She’s too big to be safe on Mom’s lap - she’s a huge projectile in the case of turbulence. Get her in the seat and buckle her in! This is not optional.
The only thing I can’t tell from the article is how long, if at all, they allowed the parents to try. They say there was a 15 minute delay, but was that before boarding even boarded, or was that delay caused by the parents trying to deal with the kid? If they were sincerely rushed, then I could see be pissed at the airline. But if they had 15 minutes to deal with a tantrum and didn’t, then there’s no sympathy from me.
Their tickets were refunded AND they were offered free round trip tickets anywhere the airline flies. This wasn’t a mean decision, it was a “we have to get this plane off the ground and we’re already 15 minutes delayed” decision.
And 3 years old is hardly a “toddler”. Toddlers toddle. Once they can run and throw with a semblance of accuracy, they’re little kids.
As the parent of a toddler, I support the airline’s decision. The plane can’t take off with the 3 year old running around, and they can’t wait forever.
Why didn’t the parents physically put the kid in her seat and buckle her in? I have had to do that with a screaming, in full meltdown mode 2 year old before in my car. It’s not easy but with 2 parents you can certainly do it. Then the child is still crying but at least you can take off and try to get the kid calmed down with a sucker or some Benadryl or something.
If the rule is that everyone has to be seated and buckled in, that means everyone. If I refused to do it, I would expect to get escorted off the plane, and if I can’t get my kid to do it, I would expect to get escorted off the plane.
When my daughter had just turned 2, we were on a flight and she did not want to get in her car seat, which was strapped into the seat next to me. I tried to hold her on my lap for takeoff, and the flight attendant said no, if she was over two, then she had to be strapped in. So I strapped her in. It wasn’t easy, because she was NOT happy about being forced to sit in that seat. (Anyone who has had to practically lay on top of the kid to get the car seat straps buckled knows what I’m talking about!) And she screamed the whole time…but she was strapped in!!! Sometimes, you just have to make them do things they don’t want to do. It sucks to be the bad guy, but that’s life.
Another vote for the airline. If you can’t control your child enough to get her to comply with minimum safety standards, then you need to take whatever steps are necessary to calm her down and get her compliance. BUT you do that in the terminal, because the rest of the 100+ people on the plane don’t have to be delayed while you get a handle on your kid. And then you take a later flight. Seems easy enough to me. If the inconvenience is anyone’s fault, it’s yours as parents, or your child’s. Not that I assign real blame to a three year old; this is one of those “that’s life” situations, one of those things that can happen when you have kids. I don’t even think the airline owed them free roundtrip tickets. If I’m irked by anything, it’s the parents’ assumption that it would have been fairer and more appropriate to inconvenience and delay everyone else on the plane.
We had a long and particularly heated thread about kids on airplanes a few years ago, in which I was one of those defending parents and kids from those who maintained that anyone under a certain age should be barred from all air travel, but I gotta come down on AirTran’s side on this one. Crying or typical toddler behavior is one thing, but the FAA regs are pretty clear, and if the parents aren’t able to corral their kid into a seat with the belt fastened by the time the boarding doors have been closed, then the airline did the right thing. The only thing that gives me pause is that the story says the crew made the decision because “the flight was already 15 minutes late”; it implies but does not say that the flight was late because of this incident, while the parents claim that they were not given an opportunity to calm their daughter down. If the flight had been delayed for other reasons and they were trying to board and depart in a hurry and in fact did not give the parents a reasonable chance to get the kid properly situated, then I might be less inclined to favor the airline. Nonetheless, as has already been pointed out, they did refund the family’s money and offered them additional round-trip tickets anywhere they fly, so it’s not as if they didn’t try to compensate the family for their inconvenience. So yeah, until someone convinces me that the flight crew jumped the gun and hustled them off without giving them a chance to deal with the situation, I’m with AirTran on this one
BTW, I have three small children, all of whom are veterans of several commercial air trips. I also travel alone very frequently on business, so I think I’m able to understand both sides of this sort of debate.
Unfortunately, it also can be the only way a kid learns what is optional and what is not. When I worked as a nanny, I had to buckle in by force a 2 year old who would be arching his back and screaming. But you do it two or five or ten or twenty times, and the kid learns that being in the car seat is not optional, that he has to sit there every single time he gets in the car, and that having a tantrum will not change that. I kind of wonder if a child who simply refuses to sit still and have her seatbelt buckled on an airplane has routinely been made to do so in a car, making it just “one of those things we do because we have to, and we don’t have a fit about it, because it happens every time and all the time.” If she’s not expected to do it at home, I’m not surprised she wouldn’t do it on a plane. That doesn’t make her the airline’s problem, though.
That is true. I hadn’t had too many instances of it in the car at that point. I have had a few since then…we went through a phase for a while…but you are right, that phase passed, and it probably was at least partially because she learned she can’t fight it. (That particular day, I think my daughter had kind of reached her limit of being strapped in, because she had been on another plane that day, we had a layover where she had to be in her stroller, etc…she hates getting in & out & in again, and this still sets her off sometimes.)
It does make you wonder what the kid gets away with at home.
I didn’t witness the event, but from seeing the passivity of the mom, my guess would be that they are the type of parents who need to have the consent of the child for everything. You know the sort of thing I mean: where they feel the child must consciously accept whatever is planned–whether it’s a trip to the doctor’s office, or the lunch menu, or what to wear to school–rather than have it imposed upon her by those dreaded authority figures, her Parents.
And in this mindset, they will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to persuade the child to do whatever it is, trying to build a consensus that “Yes, it’s really important to wear the warm coat today”, but if the kid doesn’t consent to wear the warm coat, then either it doesn’t happen, and she wears the Disney Princess windbreaker while Mom worries about pneumonia, or, more likely, Mom bribes her: “We’ll go by the video store on the way home if you’ll wear the warm coat.”
And in the case of truly vital things like trips to the doctor, bribes with Large Expensive Toys are fully explored.
So my guess would be that if left to their own devices, there on the airplane, Mom and Dad would have eventually gotten around to, “We’ll buy you this particular toy if you’ll get in your seat.” However, AirTran didn’t give them that option.
And good on 'em, say I, as a mom who has paid her dues wrestling screaming toddlers into car seats.
Father of three with our middle child (four-year-old, autistic, OCD, and mentally retarded) checking in. Put children in a seat, keep them as quite and occupied as possible, and be considerate of others.
We’ve taken a few trips. It’s hard because our middle child wants to pace. When we’re airborne and people are moving about to the bathroom or stretching I walk with him. But, not so much that he’s constantly passing by everyone’s seat. We’ve had tantrums and apologized to people. And we are certainly relieved to hear other baby’s give a cry or a fit here and there. We’re usually in the back with the other families-with-kids so the noise is more constrained.
The worst was a trip my wife made with our middle child. He started off well, but all through the middle of the flight was screaming because he was tired and wanted to pace. The prescription chloral hydrate to calm him didn’t kick in soon enough. She was taking him to a clinical study to help determine the cause of conditions like his (she’s a great mom!). Exiting the plane at the end, other people in the airport thought he looked so cute sleeping in his stroller. Just a little angel.
Heh. A friend of mine ‘tested’ out some Benadryl on her son the day before a flight, and all it did was make him more wired. I’m sure everyone on the flight would have LOVED that!
As far as this story, I’ve been following it for a couple of days, and I think the airline was perfectly in the right (except for giving the family free tickets on top of another flight home and a refund). It seems like these parents are of the ‘come on, honey, don’t do that…please sit down…honey…come on…’ mindset, which was kind of solidified by their appearance on TV.
One thing that horrified me, though - apparently, in an article about it (I’m trying to find out where this article ran, but I trust the person who told me about it), the parents had three seats - one block of two seats, and then a single seat in the row behind the two seats. Apparently, they were trying to seat the child in the SINGLE SEAT :eek: . By herself. In a row of strange people. No wonder she didn’t want to stay seated! Any sympathy I may have had for the parents after that is totally gone - however, I feel terribly sorry for that little girl.
Having had four 3-year-old children – all grown up now – I think that would be crazy. Even the best-behaved 3-year-old needs to be with someone familiar in a setting like that, and should have been sitting next to Mum or Dad, with the other parent sitting behind. I don’t understand why that didn’t occur to them, especially after the first 10 minutes of trying to settle the child.
Maybe one or more of the people who would have been seated next to her slipped the stewardess a bill showing three figures to hasten the bumping-off procedure.
or something.