EF: Did you guys see that video from not that long ago? I think it came out recently. But it might have actually been an old video that resurfaced, of a gentleman on a plane who was just screaming, because there was a baby somewhere on the plane that wouldn’t stop screaming. It was unbelievable. I don’t know what this gentleman had gone through that day. But you couldn’t hear the baby screaming because this man is screaming so much. And I when I say screaming, I mean, screaming, which to me was like, “Oh, my gosh, what is going on with this individual? What is wrong with him?” And he’s the one who got so much sympathy. Like, hang on. The point was he, a grown man, was acting even worse than a six-month-old baby by screaming, and he expected the baby to stop screaming.
AE: I see adults misbehave so much worse than children on flights all the time.
There is a difference, by the way, between babies and kids. Because babies are scared, they’re overwhelmed, they’re confused. They’re gonna cry. Kids misbehaving is something that I definitely have problems with.
MB: Yeah, I just think back to like, the first long-haul flights that I can remember, probably when I was six or seven. And just being an angel. Because my parents would have murdered me if I was anything but. And I was flying last week and there was a kid who was like 10-12 kicking the shit out of my seat and grabbing my seat and those are the things that drive me crazy. Because that at that point it is definitely on the parent.
MO: I think there’s a distinction here too, right? Where you were the individual person affected—a baby crying affects the whole area but if it is this 10-year-old who’s sitting behind you and like flicking popcorn over your head, it feels personal and that is a child who’s engaged with their motor skills and they need to be told to stop. So I think there is a little bit of a difference here about when you talk about, as you say, babies versus kids?
EF: I kind of think in that situation, Mercedes, I would have gone straight to the kid and said, “Excuse me, you need to stop kicking my seat.” If that child feels like they can engage in a way that’s very individualized, and you’re polite about it, you’re not yelling at somebody else’s child, which, of course, nobody should do. You can speak directly to the child, and say please stop. And then when he doesn’t, you involve the parents because the parent should be on it in the first place. Of course, when parents are separated from their kids, it gives them all sorts of free rein to misbehave.
