Dad Shuts Down Complaints About Babies On Planes In 4 Tweets
Parents want a quiet flight just as much as you do
Board a plane with a baby or small child and you will see people who are already in their seats visibly praying that you don’t take the seat next to them. There are some caring souls out there who understand that babies cry, and sometimes that crying happens mid-flight. But not everyone is as sympathetic.
Earlier this week, dad Elon James White, founder of the multimedia platform This Week in Blackness, read a social media post about someone who had yelled at parents to keep their children quiet on a plane. White tweeted the question that all parents who have ever been stuck with an inconsolable child at 37,000 feet really wants the answer to: “What exactly are parents expected to do?”
He elaborated:
It’s so true. You can plan your flights around your kids’ nap schedules, pack a ton of snacks and an entire bag full of coloring books, games and toys. You can even attempt to bribe a toddler with candy or the toddler holy grail — your phone. At the end of the day, they’re humans, even if they’re small ones. They have the free will to cry if they want to, and we can only try our best to stop them.
As much as we all want to have a calm, quiet flight, when you board a plane you do so knowing there may be kids on it and they may, in fact, make noise. And if a childfree person is looking for a life where they never have to hear a crying child, guess they can scratch grocery stores, malls, parks, Target and anywhere ice cream trucks park off their list of places to go.
No one wants a crying child on an airplane to settle down more than their own parent. Trust us.
White told The Huffington Post he and his wife have never personally experienced someone on a flight saying something negative to them about their child, but they’ve heard plenty of stories from others. “My wife and I both try everything in our power to make sure our child isn’t the crying baby because we’ve heard so many people say such awful things about parents and kids on planes,” he said. “But having tried to calm a 5-month-old down on a plane, seeing the post on social media about how parents need to control their kids really got to me. It implied that parents are just letting kids cry when in all honesty when a kid is crying their parents are the ones who are the most frustrated.”After White’s tweets many parents chimed in with their personal experiences flying with children. Some non-parents spoke up in support parents.
White says the conversation has been “great” and hopes that more people start to realize that parents don’t deserve disrespect for traveling with their families.
“You may not have chosen to have children but you did choose to engage in society and society has fricken’ children in them,” he said. “The last thing parents need when their little ones are upset is the fear or shame that people heap on to them because they are temporarily inconvenienced.”
