In an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Monday night, actor Kaley Cuoco shared the story of her 9-month-old daughter Matilda’s memorable first airplane flight, which occurred over Thanksgiving.
Like most parents, Cuoco and her partner, Tom Pelphrey, were anxious about how their daughter would handle the plane ride. No one wants to be the parent of the baby that spent the whole flight screaming.
“I was so terrified,” Cuoco told Kimmel. “I thought, ‘What do we do?’ We have to bring her sound machine on the plane. It’s the only thing she’ll go to sleep to.”
At this point, Kimmel pointed out that an airplane basically functions as a giant sound machine, and Cuoco admitted that it was difficult to hear the machine at all over the plane’s background noise.
Cuoco and Pelphrey did turn on the machine when their daughter began crying, holding it up to her ear so that the noise could have its intended effect and soothe her to sleep.
Unfortunately, another passenger was able to hear the sound machine, too.
Initially, the parents were relieved that their plan worked. “She’s crying, we put the sound machine on. It was hard. She finally falls asleep and she’s on Tom and the sound machine is on and we’re finally like —” here Cuoco gave a dramatic sigh, closed her eyes and let her body go limp.
Their relief was short-lived, however, because a flight attendant soon approached them and said, “One of our passengers would love it if you could turn the sound machine off,” Cuoco recounted.
“I can hear Tom be like, ‘Ask the passenger if she wants to hold our screaming child,’” Cuoco said. “The ice went into his veins.”
By the time the plane landed, baby Matilda was awake and happy, and the requester made her identity known.
“It was the woman right in front of us,” Cuoco said. “She goes, ‘Oh, so your daughter does know how to smile.’”
The rage she felt in that moment, Cuoco said, made her realise “why women end up on Dateline.”
The entire interaction is a new parent’s worst nightmare. You finally find a solution that works for your family, and then you’re publicly judged for it.
HuffPost asked a few parenting and etiquette experts what other parents — and passengers — can learn from this ordeal.
Be proactive and come prepared.
Jenna Hermans, author of “Chaos To Calm: 5 Ways Busy Parents Can Break Free From Overwhelm,” told HuffPost that she believes “the best approach” is “being proactive.”
As a mother of four, Hermans empathises with parents like Cuoco who worry that other passengers will become upset if their child makes noise.
“Babies are people, too,” she said, and sometimes they have to travel.
But she also believes that parents are responsible for doing their part to try to keep the flight peaceful. Before flying with her own baby for the first time, she did a little research and learned that babies are most likely to experience discomfort in their ears during takeoff and landing, and that having them feeding or sucking on a pacifier can offer some relief. In addition, “I brought a whole bunch of those little earplugs. I bought a huge pack of them. And as we came onto the plane, I said, ’This is our first time with a baby on a plane and I’ve done tons of research to see how I can help him have the best experience. ... And just in case it doesn’t go well, here’s some earplugs.”
While bringing earplugs could be considered going above and beyond, etiquette experts recommend that parents prepare for the flight in some way — which Cuoco and her partner did, knowing that the sound machine might assist in getting their baby to fall asleep.
“It is the parent’s responsibility to travel with everything they know that comforts the child,” Jackie Vernon-Thompson, owner of From the Inside Out School of Etiquette, told HuffPost. For babies, this might be a bottle, pacifier or lovey. For children toddler age and above, the most reliable tool to keep them quiet is usually an iPad. Vernon-Thompson notes, however, that parents need to be sure to provide their child with headphones so that surrounding passengers aren’t also subjected to hours of “Ms. Rachel.”
“Consider that the passengers paid for the flight as well. It is the responsibility of the parent to ensure that if there is something with sound used, the baby alone should hear it,” Vernon-Thompson continued.
This puts Cuoco’s sound machine in a sort of gray area. As the reliable way to soothe their baby, it’s understandable that they decided to bring it. But it’s also not unreasonable for other passengers to expect families to keep noise to a minimum.
“Bringing a noise machine on the plane is a stretch if it’s loud enough for other passengers to hear it,” said Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert who owns the Protocol School of Texas.
Hope for the empathy of others on the flight.
Hermans showed consideration for her fellow passengers by providing them with earplugs, and it’s not unreasonable for parents to expect a little empathy in return. Some people may remember how difficult it was to travel with small children, and, as Kimmel pointed out, the people complaining about infants on planes were in fact once babies themselves.
“We’re all a community,” Hermans said. “We should all be treating each other with respect no matter where we are.”
As a parent flying with a baby, you know that crying may be disruptive. “If we know that there’s something that could be uncomfortable for everyone, I do think that there is a level of internal responsibility,” she said. This might take the form of earplugs, attempts to soothe the baby, or even a simple apology.
Apologising to others within earshot, Vernon-Thompson said, “shows the passengers that the parent has acknowledged that their experience has become the experience of the other passengers and they realize it may not be as pleasant as they would like. It also helps them to see that you are making every attempt to calm your little one.”
And you never know, she added. One of them may even offer to help by walking up and down the aisle with the baby.
“The airplane is a small space shared by a great number of people. Anything that happens in that space affects everyone. Therefore, it just may take a village,” she said.
Hermans added that it’s helpful for everyone involved to “presume positive intent.” Cuoco and Pelphrey brought the white noise machine on board for the benefit of their fellow passengers, not to be a nuisance.
“If you have a neighbour with an upset child, or a kid who’s trying to maybe get your attention, that just wants to play peekaboo or something ... We’re all in this together. Why not play a little peekaboo over the chair or smile back at the baby? Everyone’s just doing the best that they can,” Hermans said.
In that situation, she might ask the other passenger whether they preferred the sound of the baby crying or the noise machine, and perhaps offer to buy them a drink or loan them some earplugs.
“In those moments of confrontation, it’s, ‘How can I support you? How can I help you to be more comfortable?’” Hermans said.
She noted that a parent shouldn’t overlook their own needs in this equation. In addition to trying to soothe the baby and pacify fellow passengers, a parent should ask themselves, “What can I do for me before going onto the plane that can help my nervous system to regulate?”
Use the flight attendant as an intermediary.
Gottsman and Vernon-Thompson agreed that it was best for the passenger to speak with the flight attendant rather than confronting Cuoco and Pelphrey on her own.
“This fellow passenger did the right thing by contacting the flight attendant, rather than handling the situation by themselves. Rather than starting a potential altercation with another passenger, they asked [for] assistance,” Gottsman said.
“What was not appropriate was the unkind comment made by a fellow passenger about the innocent baby’s facial expression,” she added.
What can we conclude, then, from Cuoco and Pelphrey’s experience? Flying can be unpleasant for anyone, but it’s particularly stressful for parents of young children, who may feel others already giving them and their children unfriendly looks as they come down the aisle during boarding.
As passengers trapped together in a giant metal tube for two or eight or even twenty hours, perhaps the best we can hope for from our fellow travellers is a sense of solidarity, a dose of empathy — and, if necessary, the wisdom to know that the low hum of a white noise machine is a much more pleasant sound than a baby’s screaming.