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Flying with babies (and other young children) presents challenges which "everyone else" doesn't have to deal with. Babies and children need much more attention.

Flying with babies (and other young children) presents challenges which "everyone else" doesn't have to deal with. Babies and children need much more attention. Babies are much more likely to throw tantrums, to feel pain from pressure changes, to be sick, etc. They often need a LOT of soothing. Many also need to be breast fed (some babies don't take bottles), which depending on the baby's length and the side they're nursing on may involve their legs sticking into the aisle or their neighbor's space. They also like to fling solid foods, spit up or vomit with no warning, and are generally fantastic at making messes. My spouse and I just finished our first two flights with our 11 month old this weekend which were about 3.5 and 4 hours apiece. Even with an extra seat reserved for them and an overall extremely well tempered baby, I cannot imagine how much harder the flight would have been if the gate agent hadn't been able to rearrange our seats so all three of us were sitting together. If that hadn't been guaranteed, we would have had to ask one of the neighbors to swap seats with us. They'd have been highly motivated to do so, but it wouldn't have been a sure thing. They may have their own needs. Impromptu swaps during boarding seems not great for making the process go smoothly. Having to get an extra seat to fit a car seat for an infant isn't required, but flying with the infant in a car seat is strongly recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Having somewhere to put the baby or their various toys/bottles temporarily helps a whole lot over a four hour flight. This already added $500 onto the price of our trip. The cost of raising children is already very high in the US, so it will really suck if flying becomes yet more expensive and stressful. In my opinion, this (and many others) are a cost which we should spread out if we actually want people to have kids.

ToucanLoucan 1y ago
The "growth every quarter" is a disease that is going to destroy our civilization, said without an ounce of hyperbole. Air travel is a solved problem and there's no innovation really to be done; the planes are packed like cans of sardines most of the time, the food is awful, and the travel itself is expensive, cumbersome, and a miserable experience overall but they are STILL trying to find ways to juice revenue, up to and including separating children from parents and charging them to be put back together.
tveyben 1y ago
Do kids have to fly…???
- scruple 1y ago
  No one does, so what's your point?
  - rimunroe 1y ago
    A small correction, but there are plenty of reasons someone might require flying. The travel might be required and also be on a tight schedule or terrain might be impractical to traverse by other methods. As an example: a friend of mine had to fly across the continental US for spinal surgery because traveling is stressful on the body and they couldn't be e.g. on a train for multiple days. People move across oceans all the time and might not have the luxury of being able to make a long trip by boat.
- ASinclair 1y ago
  Do adults have to fly? Certainly they could walk or swim to their destination.
- hiroantag 1y ago
  What an odd question...families travel all the time for vacations or to see grandma and grandpa for thanksgiving. You can't leave a kid at home.
  - zerkten 1y ago
    You would think that this is an odd question. It's such an odd question if grant a degree of anonymity. I've seen a similar type of question, as it relates to affordances for parents in the workplace, like no on-call for a time when a newborn is on the scene. I don't know if this is just happening because people are feeling unfairly impacted when folks on teams become parents, but I'm always bracing for these comments now.
    - 1y ago
Spooky23 1y ago
Let it be the airlines problem. My screaming five year old is going to generate a bunch of complaints and refunds for the airline. The kid will get over it, and the misery of the rest of the people on the flight isn’t my problem. The stewardess can deal with it and nobody gets their peanuts.
- rimunroe 1y ago
  I'd rather it be solely a problem of their profits rather than adding inconvenience to families as well. Also, my kid is going to be a lot happier and less likely to be upset and bother everyone else if both of us are there to entertain her and keep each other from being frazzled.
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    Agreed. The point of these things is that the company is betting on you doing the decent thing at your expense. I refuse to accommodate their failure. I was in one of these situations once where we missed a scheduled flight because of an airline screwup, and they refused to accommodate us without a substantial payment - thousands of dollars. Frankly, I couldn’t afford it. This despite the fact I already paid for an assigned seat on the fubar flight. The predictable outcome happened after they pulled away from the gate and the flight crew came to me and my response was “He’s 20 rows away, what do you expect me to do? Sounds like the options are to move us, or return to the gate.” They figured it out and were great about it, but the whole situation was stressful to everyone and was completely unnecessary. Flight crews are busy and it’s just senseless toil.
  - mothballed 1y ago
    There's a lot of kids that aren't like that once they reach, say, toddler age. They know they can terrorize mom/dad as much as they like and they'll still be there, so they ruthlessly exploit that. They can be ruthlessly terrorizing next to their parents, but put them next to a stranger they'll be polite and relatively quiet because they intuitively know they are capable of anything. i.e. when my child was young, a waiter could hand them a lemonade and they'd be ecstatic. If I handed them the same lemonade, they would start screaming at me the color of cup was wrong.
AtlanticThird 1y ago
I'm fine subsidizing necessities for kids, but flying is a luxury
- rimunroe 1y ago
  As I said elsewhere in the thread there are situations where it's not a luxury. A bigger point though is that it's an additional burden on parents for something childless people simply don't need to deal with. Childless people might want assigned seats, but they don't need to sit next to an infant. When a parent can't sit near their kid it negatively impacts everyone else on board the aircraft. It might result in the kid screaming more, but it'll also definitely require people to get up and shuffle around more frequently as parents come to change/feed/soothe their infants (car seats/bassinets are not supposed to be in aisle seats).
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    Then the airlines should offer those more flexible people the option to buy a cheaper ticket that doesn’t include seat assignment. Just brainstorming here, they might call those tickets “Basic” or something. Then, people with that flexibility could offer that flexibility to the airline in exchange for a cheaper ticket that meets their needs and people who don’t have the same level of flexibility could buy tickets that reflect their needs. I say this as a parent who pays for assigned seats because we choose to buy tickets that reflect our actual level of flexibility.
    - rimunroe 1y ago
      I assume this is a somewhat flippant/sarcastic response, but it completely ignores the gist of the message (well, multiple messages) you're replying to. > I say this as a parent who pays for assigned seats because we choose to buy tickets that reflect our actual level of flexibility. For what it's worth, I'm saying all this as a parent who flies on airlines where assigned seats are the only option afaik
      - sokoloff 1y ago

ToucanLoucan 1y ago

The "growth every quarter" is a disease that is going to destroy our civilization, said without an ounce of hyperbole. Air travel is a solved problem and there's no innovation really to be done; the planes are packed like cans of sardines most of the time, the food is awful, and the travel itself is expensive, cumbersome, and a miserable experience overall but they are STILL trying to find ways to juice revenue, up to and including separating children from parents and charging them to be put back together.

tveyben 1y ago

Do kids have to fly…???

scruple 1y ago
No one does, so what's your point?
- rimunroe 1y ago
  A small correction, but there are plenty of reasons someone might require flying. The travel might be required and also be on a tight schedule or terrain might be impractical to traverse by other methods. As an example: a friend of mine had to fly across the continental US for spinal surgery because traveling is stressful on the body and they couldn't be e.g. on a train for multiple days. People move across oceans all the time and might not have the luxury of being able to make a long trip by boat.
ASinclair 1y ago
Do adults have to fly? Certainly they could walk or swim to their destination.
hiroantag 1y ago
What an odd question...families travel all the time for vacations or to see grandma and grandpa for thanksgiving. You can't leave a kid at home.
- zerkten 1y ago
  You would think that this is an odd question. It's such an odd question if grant a degree of anonymity. I've seen a similar type of question, as it relates to affordances for parents in the workplace, like no on-call for a time when a newborn is on the scene. I don't know if this is just happening because people are feeling unfairly impacted when folks on teams become parents, but I'm always bracing for these comments now.
  - 1y ago

Spooky23 1y ago

Let it be the airlines problem. My screaming five year old is going to generate a bunch of complaints and refunds for the airline. The kid will get over it, and the misery of the rest of the people on the flight isn’t my problem. The stewardess can deal with it and nobody gets their peanuts.

rimunroe 1y ago
I'd rather it be solely a problem of their profits rather than adding inconvenience to families as well. Also, my kid is going to be a lot happier and less likely to be upset and bother everyone else if both of us are there to entertain her and keep each other from being frazzled.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  Agreed. The point of these things is that the company is betting on you doing the decent thing at your expense. I refuse to accommodate their failure. I was in one of these situations once where we missed a scheduled flight because of an airline screwup, and they refused to accommodate us without a substantial payment - thousands of dollars. Frankly, I couldn’t afford it. This despite the fact I already paid for an assigned seat on the fubar flight. The predictable outcome happened after they pulled away from the gate and the flight crew came to me and my response was “He’s 20 rows away, what do you expect me to do? Sounds like the options are to move us, or return to the gate.” They figured it out and were great about it, but the whole situation was stressful to everyone and was completely unnecessary. Flight crews are busy and it’s just senseless toil.
- mothballed 1y ago
  There's a lot of kids that aren't like that once they reach, say, toddler age. They know they can terrorize mom/dad as much as they like and they'll still be there, so they ruthlessly exploit that. They can be ruthlessly terrorizing next to their parents, but put them next to a stranger they'll be polite and relatively quiet because they intuitively know they are capable of anything. i.e. when my child was young, a waiter could hand them a lemonade and they'd be ecstatic. If I handed them the same lemonade, they would start screaming at me the color of cup was wrong.

AtlanticThird 1y ago

I'm fine subsidizing necessities for kids, but flying is a luxury

rimunroe 1y ago
As I said elsewhere in the thread there are situations where it's not a luxury. A bigger point though is that it's an additional burden on parents for something childless people simply don't need to deal with. Childless people might want assigned seats, but they don't need to sit next to an infant. When a parent can't sit near their kid it negatively impacts everyone else on board the aircraft. It might result in the kid screaming more, but it'll also definitely require people to get up and shuffle around more frequently as parents come to change/feed/soothe their infants (car seats/bassinets are not supposed to be in aisle seats).
- sokoloff 1y ago
  Then the airlines should offer those more flexible people the option to buy a cheaper ticket that doesn’t include seat assignment. Just brainstorming here, they might call those tickets “Basic” or something. Then, people with that flexibility could offer that flexibility to the airline in exchange for a cheaper ticket that meets their needs and people who don’t have the same level of flexibility could buy tickets that reflect their needs. I say this as a parent who pays for assigned seats because we choose to buy tickets that reflect our actual level of flexibility.
  - rimunroe 1y ago
    I assume this is a somewhat flippant/sarcastic response, but it completely ignores the gist of the message (well, multiple messages) you're replying to. > I say this as a parent who pays for assigned seats because we choose to buy tickets that reflect our actual level of flexibility. For what it's worth, I'm saying all this as a parent who flies on airlines where assigned seats are the only option afaik
    - sokoloff 1y ago