Babies on a Plane
How airlines can make traveling with kids less of a nightmare.
by Hana Schank
September 3, 2007
Here's a fun variation on air travel: you arrive at the airport with your toddler, struggle through security and manage to get everyone onto the plane in one piece, only to have the stewardess suggest that you drug your child with Baby Benadryl. When you refuse, she throws you off the plane. Or how about this: your kids, aged two and four, are acting up on the plane — fighting over the window shade, knocking over cups — so you start smacking them. Then you get drunk. When the plane lands, you are arrested and your kids are put in protective custody.
Both of these scenarios played out in the friendly skies in the past few weeks. While it is easy to have sympathy for the Baby Benadryl mother and harder to have sympathy for the drunk one, taken together the two stories provide a good snapshot of the experience of traveling with small children. In summary: everyone is annoyed, tensions run high, and sometimes you just want to get hammered.
Air travel has become so impossible that when kids get thrown into the mix, it leaves parents trying to deal with a situation that is unrealistic and hopeless (i.e. getting a toddler who has skipped his nap because he needed to be at the airport two hours before his flight to sit quietly for the duration of the trip). And then people yell at you, blaming parents — usually mothers — for mishandling a situation that is unmanageable. While the solution isn't to get drunk and beat your kids, there have been plenty of times I've been on a plane with my one-and-a-half year old son Milo when I would have given anything for a couple of swigs of whiskey, or when I had to restrainI have traveled with my son almost every month since his birth, and each trip holds some new nadir of absurdity. myself from screaming "I WANT TO GET OFF THE PLANE TOO, BUT DO YOU SEE ME BASHING MY HEAD AGAINST THE WINDOW AND YELLING 'OFF OFF OFF?' WELL, DO YOU?"
It's almost as though the airline industry is working to make traveling with children as difficult as possible. I have traveled with my son almost every month since his birth, and each trip holds some new nadir of absurdity. When Milo was four months old, he wore shoes for the first time. They weren't really even shoes, they were Robeez, which I'd put on his feet to prevent him from ripping his socks off and shoving them into his mouth. When we got to security I was informed that I needed to remove the shoes and put them through the x-ray machine. It was as if the people at security were conspiring to make it as unlikely as possible that the baby might sleep through the trip (which surely was in the best interest of not only me but everyone else in the entire airport) by not only requiring that I take apart the stroller and remove my own shoes while balancing a baby on my hip and simultaneously displaying my boarding pass and driver's license, but also asking that I take shoes off of someone who wasn't even able to walk yet.
When my son was six months old, I discovered that I was required to present all baby food for inspection. There was invariably one that always got lost somewhere at the bottom of the diaper bag, which means anyone traveling with an infant is guaranteed to have to go through extra-special-double-secret security (or whatever they call it when you have to get re-screened with a screaming baby).
©2007 Hana Schank and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Hana Schank is the author of the memoir A More Perfect Union: How I Survived the Happiest Day of My Life. Her writing has appeared in Glamour, Destination Weddings and Honeymoons, and other national publications. She lives in Brooklyn, but you can visit her online at www.hanaschank.com.
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