Yesterday a story stopped me in my tracks – two women had been charged after an argument ended in a scuffle on a flight (and by scuffle, I mean they threw a cushion and water bottle at each other).
What had prompted such a heated exchange? According to reports, the altercation began because of a child crying.
It’s not the first time you’ll hear of this, and it won’t be the last. There’s a cohort of people who want to be able to reap the benefits of public transport but don’t actually want the rest of the public (particularly babies) to travel as well.
Like the infamous chap from last year who completely lost his cool over a baby crying and started swearing and yelling about it in an exchange which was captured on video.
Or the two strangers who locked a baby – yes, a one-year-old child – in the bathroom with them so they could “educate” her (read: bully her) into stopping crying.
Look, I get why people are annoyed by crying. As someone whose second baby cried and cried and cried every evening for months, I know how difficult it is to sit there while a child is upset.
Our brains are hard-wired to respond strongly to such cries, regardless of whether we’re the parent or not. We get stressed, we get anxious, our fight or flight kicks in.
But at the same time, parents (and their babies, because funnily enough they can’t just leave them at home on their own) have a right to fly on a plane, just like anyone else does.
And, you know, ear plugs, headphones and even noise-cancelling headphones exist these days, as do child-free zones on flights – and I’ve got no qualms about those.
We tolerate so many other things on flights: bare feet, rowdy passengers on their way back from hen and stag dos, loud eating, boozy breath, people’s bodily smells, coughing, you name it.
But when it comes to a child crying – whether that’s because they can’t speak and they have to tell us they’re not happy somehow, or they cannot control their emotions very well (most kids under the age of five) – some people simply cannot deal.
And we all know that making snide comments or telling parents to “shut their baby up” is not going to do an awful lot other than infuriate or embarrass the parent even more. If you really want the baby to stop crying, why not try to distract them – or better yet, offer to help?
And it’s not just on flights where the anti-baby sentiment appears to be growing. In a piece for CNN, journalist Harmeet Kaur noted there’s been a wider (and pretty negative) shift in the way people talk about kids. For some they should be seen and not heard. For others, not seen at all.
Parents – especially mums – have enough to contend with already, without having to worry who we’re going to upset on a flight.
We don’t want to reach a point where mums are staying at home with their babies and not going on holidays, or taking the train to see their friends, because of the risk of conflict. Motherhood is lonely enough as it is.
I hate confrontation and have travelled on a plane three times since having kids and every single time I’ve been riddled with anxiety over whether they’re going to cry or not – and whether the people around me will look upon us sympathetically or kick off.
Thankfully I’ve not yet had an encounter where people have been rude. When our eldest daughter cried on flights as a baby, people wouldn’t get up in arms about it – they’d try to distract her by making funny faces or talking to her instead.
But the more I read stories about people getting into altercations because of kids crying, the more I worry that I will encounter some of this in the near future if we go away again.
Thankfully there are still a lot of kind folks out there, like Eli McCann who recently shared this encounter she had with a mum on a plane: “Years ago I was on a flight in a row with a mom, her newborn, and toddler and both kids were screaming so I turned to her and said ‘I know I’m a stranger but can I take the baby’ and she started crying and immediately passed him to me and now that I have a baby I really get her.”
If we can all be a bit more like Eli, that would be great. And if you don’t want to hear the baby crying; please hold off on the eye-rolls, loud sighs and off-hand comments, and stick your earplugs in.