Lacking empathy
Over at Crunchy Cons, guest blogger Erin Manning links to this story about an unruly, uncontrollable toddler who caused a flight to be delayed. This is the passage she quotes:
As the American Eagle flight headed down the taxiway, two-and-a-half-year-old Jarett Farrell wasn’t a happy traveler.
His mother says she was doing all she could to calm the autistic boy, but got no sympathy from the flight crew.
“If they just would have been a little more understanding I think that none of this would have been a problem,” Mother, Janice Farrell said.
But it became a big problem for everyone on the plane. Farrell says that’s because the flight attendant was indignant.
“She kept coming over and tugging his seatbelt to make it tighter, ‘This has to stay tight’. And then he was wiggling around and trying to get out of his seatbelt. And she kept coming over and reprimanding him and yelling at him,” Farrell said.
Wow, that sounds awful. How dare an airline employee pick on a poor little kid! But maybe…just maybe…there’s a little more to this story. Let’s see the airline’s side of things.
“He just melted down. He saw me getting upset. He was upset. He was on the floor rolling around,” she said. …
A spokesman in Dallas says Jarret was pitching a “raging fit”.
And that Janice, who was in a front-row seat, refused to allow her bag to be placed in an overhead compartment, even though there was no under seat stowage.
He says that with a “passenger not complying with FAA regulations, this was the right decision.”
So let’s see: we have a kid who refuses to stay seated with the seatbelt on; was rolling around on the floor; was screaming uncontrollably; and was generally disrupting the flight crew. These are all things the mother admits to. This isn’t the theater, where the little precious could simply disrupt everyone’s viewing pleasure–this is a soon-to-be-in-flight airplane could be put at risk if things in the cabin get out of control.
Yup. I’m lacking empathy with the mother. Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I’ve dealt with one two many out of control, screaming children in situations where there should be zero out of control, screaming children. If your child can’t behave, don’t put him in that situation.