At the risk of appearing to be a raving child-hater (I’m not; nothing could be further from the truth. I love polite, well-brought-up, well-mannered children), I have to state the blindingly obvious.
[deep breath]
There are some places where very young children do not belong.
Some definitions are needed here, for the sake of clarity.
a. By ‘very young children’ I mean children who are of such an immaturity that they are out of control
b. And by ‘some places where they do not belong’ I mean a long-haul flight.
These things are, surely, just a matter of common sense?
Because, by what stretch of the imagination can it be acceptable, for over 400 long-haul passengers to have inflicted on them a child which, frankly, is just going to scream and bawl its head off for huge stretches of the flight?
Or, to ask the same question another way, how can it be right for a pair of parents to fail to consider the sensitivities of over 400 long-haul passengers who just want to rest and get some peace and quiet as they travel from A to B?
Please, tell me, how can it be acceptable for parents to do these things – either to the child, or to the 440 passengers?
At the time of writing this piece, I am four hours in to a ten hour flight.
There are two – unrelated – very small children in this aircraft.
Between the two of them, these children have bawled uncontrollably for almost the entire four hours.
This poor behaviour plumbs new depths in the description of ‘ineffective parenting’.
The pivotal point here is one of selfishness, on behalf of the parents.
How selfish are these parents to bring their ‘too young to be controlled’ children on to a long haul flight?
I’d be interested in hearing from parents of similarly unruly little bastards, so that they may explain their justification for inflicting, in such an insensitive, selfish manner, their out of control offspring on over 400 people.
Four hundred people who, to be frank, haven’t paid hundreds – if not thousands – of pounds to sit in an airborne pre-school.
I realise that what I’m tacitly saying here is tht if your children are too young to be controlled, you – as a family – should be denied air travel.
I understand that’s what I’m saying.
I also understand that I have no problem saying it.
So, for the sake of clarity, I’ll sum up with:
If your child cannot be controlled (either due to their age/immaturity or your ineffectiveness as a parent), don’t take them on long-haul flights.
I’ve always said I would happily pay a 10-15% premium on normal flight prices for a guaranteed child-free flight. In fact, we were seriously considering paying the extra £2k to upgrade our honeymoon flights to first class until we remembered the story about Ivana Trump getting escorted off a flight after losing her rag at children screaming and running up and down the plane aisles. Sadly even first class is no guarantee of peace and quiet it seems 🙁
Aww, Caroline has ruined my jibe about you surely not being pestered by unruly kids in first class.
Welcome home. The old place hasn’t changed much.
Don’t they have a pen or cage for them?
It’s not necessarily to do with bad behaviour.. it is because the cabin pressure hurts their delicate ears. And I guarantee the parents feel really bad about the noise. Izzy hasn’t been like that, but I have seen parents who have had to deal with it and I feel sorry for them. Maybe all minors should be culled?!! 😉
Could they be strapped onto the wings somehow? Better than an inflight movie.
I have found that sometimes small children forget to act like 30 year-old adults. I think that’s why they’re called children.
Bulldog I’m not blaming the children. I’m blaming the ineffective parents who are incapable of making the correct informed choices, for whom being a proper parent and caring appropriately for unruly children is beyond their mental ability. I speak as someone who had to fly most of the way home from Spain covered in child vomit because of a mother who couldn’t work out that a combination of stuffing a child full of crisps and clear air turbulence would have the inevitable conclusion. Shit parents should be sterilised and forcibly re-educated.
Mya, you’re just teasing me now.
Annie, see my earlier comment about ineffective parents. People who make bad choices should be fucking punished. And who would take a small child on a long-haul flight without carrying a couple of doses of Calpol? What kind of moronic parent would subject their child to ten hours of ear-ache without taking medication along? Fucking stupid people should be sterilised.
Horrific. Sounds like my worst nightmare.
Amen to that Brennig. I think there’s a massive gap in the market for child free flights. I spent 5 hours on a flight once having the back of my seat kicked by some unholy brat and when I turned round and perfectly politely asked the mother if she could possibly ask her child to stop doing that, I got a right gobful about how she’d paid for a seat for her child so her child could do what it liked. My logic that her child was perfectly welcome to do what it liked in its seat but the one it was actually kicking was not the one she’d paid for, it was the one I’d paid for and so the behaviour was not acceptable went down like a shit-filled balloon I can tell you. Some parents are abysmal.
The lack of common sense in some people underlines how uncommon common sense actually is. Parents, in particular young parents, seem more devoid of it than most.