Parents Intentionally Sit Behind Their Misbehaving Kids On A Flight & The Woman They Are Seated With Is Accused Of Being 'Unable To Control Her Kids'
The parents seated them in a different row and ignored their problematic behavior.
Chubykin Arkady / Shutterstock Flying with kids can be frustrating and stressful. But what do you do if it’s not even your own kids you are forced to tolerate for an entire flight? One woman found out the hard way.
Parents intentionally seated their kids in a different row and made another woman responsible for their bad behavior.
In a post to the r/mildlyinfuriating subreddit, a woman started by explaining, “I had to take a flight home this weekend unexpectedly because my dad just suffered a stroke. I spent the entire weekend deep cleaning the house/meal prepping for my mom and then having quality time with my dad when they eventually discharged him.”
But the problem came when it was time to fly back home. She got an aisle seat and was surprised when two small children were seated in her row. The kids’ parents sat behind them so they could be together.
Photo: Reddit
While crying babies are a common disturbance on flights, the situation here was a bit more complicated. Because, unfortunately, the kids misbehaved from the start of the flight until the end.
The woman said that the two youngsters fought each other the entire time, made “crude jokes, and played on their electronics without using headphones." To make matters worse, they couldn’t seem to sit still and even wrestled one another, hitting her in the process.
When she attempted to drown out the racket with her noise-cancelling headphones, even that didn't work! It's a nightmare scenario for many travelers, but what happened next makes the situation even more infuriating.
She confronted the parents and asked them to intervene, but they didn’t take her complaints seriously.
The woman only asked them for help once during the two-and-a-half-hour flight, but their response was that "kids will be kids," a phrase some parents tend to use to shirk their responsibilities.
The parents went back to enjoying their flight, sans children, and were drinking while en route to their destination. But the placement of their children had one other unintended consequence for the flustered solo traveler.
Because she fit the assumed profile, everyone on the flight thought the "bad" kids belonged to her!
“I got so many bad looks and comments around me for how loud I was letting them be and ‘some people can’t control their own kids’, but I don’t even HAVE kids. Their parents were behind us drinking seltzer and I was getting flack for their poor parenting,” she added.
So not only did she have to deal with her father’s health issue, but she also couldn’t relax and took a lot of flak for the behavior of children that did not even belong to her.
Parents should never make others accountable for their children.
Rather than worrying about sitting close to each other, the mother and father should have each been paired with a child to ensure they didn’t disturb other passengers during the flight. It's not only proper flight etiquette, it's common human decency.
In addition to choosing to sit behind their kids, they then removed themselves of all responsibility, allowing themselves to relax without their kids while another passenger was forced to endure their terrible behavior.
It was a poor decision on the part of the parents, because you never know who your kids will be placed next to. If you know your children might get wild, it’s possible that the other passengers will react in a way you never anticipated.
So, your kids should be within eyesight and earshot at all times on a flight. If not for the sanity of the other passengers, do it for the safety of your kids, because not everyone will be as patient as this woman was.
NyRee Ausler is a writer from Seattle, Washington. She covers lifestyle, relationships, and human-interest stories that readers can relate to and that bring social issues to the forefront for discussion.