Part of living in a society is being civilized, and part of being civilized is developing a bit of empathy, instead of automatically assuming that anybody who bothers you is deliberately being an asshole.

So, the next time you want to complain about the selfishness of the parents of screaming brats, you may wish to stop and consider the fact that maybe, just maybe, they’re not inflicting that noise on you because they’re selfish or sadistic, but because they have no other choice. And if you can see that the parents are visibly TRYING to soothe the child or otherwise keep the situation under control, then try cutting them some slack — they’re doing the best they can.

Sometimes they even do it in the comments sections of blogs.

You people just don’t get it, do you? Yes, society has grown more selfish – but the selfish ones are not the people whose lives are being made hell by the screaming brats of feckless, incompetent parents, it is the feckless, incompetent parents who are the selfish ones. If you cannot control your children, do not go on public transport with them (or into a restaurant, for that matter). Too many people now are so self-centered that they don’t realize we live in a society. You cannot just do whatever you want in a public place.

Southwest Airlines was absolutely right in the first place, and wrong to apologize.

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/how-not-to-calm-a-child-on-a-plane/

I laughed! I heaved! It was better than Cats!

I can sympathize with people being aggravated by a kid acting up or screaming. And I can definitely sympathize with them being annoyed if the parent(s) appear to be doing diddly-squat about the ruckus. But most times, the parents ARE trying desperately to soothe, distract, amuse, or otherwise cajole the kid into being quiet, and receiving dirty looks and mutterings doesn’t help anybody now, does it?

Well, no, actually, they can’t. Before my husband’s 85-year-old mother died, she was an invalid, having had a stroke while I was pregnant with my first child. She was a very unhappy woman in the final years of her life, and seeing her grandchildren was one of the few things that brought her joy. And as much as I, personally, hate flying with young children (not because they behave badly *mine didn’t, touch wood* but because I hate exposing them to the germy cesspool that is a commercial plane), I sucked it up for her sake.

Something to think about before you go around assuming you have total insight into other people’s motivations.

Taking a plane somewhere is already a painful enough experience these days. I think it is going overboard to kick someone off the plane unless the child is crying nonstop for the whole flight. If it won’t shut up for five hours, maybe that is an indicator that there’s something wrong with the baby and there’s a good reason to land so they can get to an ER. However, I think it is completely reasonable to detest the parent and their noisy brat for giving you headaches, and to commiserate with fellow passengers about how there are very few good reasons to take an infant on a plane as it is. Can’t the grandparents visit YOU?

However.

As the offspring of a longtime airline employee, I can say with some authority that a huge part of the problem here is a mismatch between expectation and reality. People expect airline travel to be fancy. Limo-class. It’s not: it’s an airborne Greyhound.

If you lower your expectations to that (and I assure you, airlines have; just look at the service levels) you’ll see that being locked up with a nonviolent screamer for six hours is more or less what you can expect.