Dad asks if he was wrong to yell at plane passenger who told his baby to 'shut up.'
It's hard to travel with a child, but what do you do when someone on the flight calls you out for your crying baby? When this exact scenario happens to this dad, he takes to the popular Reddit forum to ask:
'AITA for yelling at a passenger after he told me to shut up while my baby was crying??'
Hi, so this occurred to me yesterday and I wanted to know if what i did was wrong a lot of people don't like traveling with babies, and i thought i could use this place as a partial ground.
Months ago i (M37) started saving up so my family and i could go on vacations to Mexico. I've only been there one time with my wife on our honeymoon, and we loved it. So we decided to go again, but now we took our kids with us, Micha 7yo and Jonah 2yo.
The thing is, it's the first time Jonah travels with us, so we prepared everything to keep him calm on the plane since it was going to be a 6hrs trip. Which is not bad but still we didn't want Jonah to feel overwhelmed. Well, he slept all the 6hrs and woke up when we were at the hotel.
We stayed for 1 week and it was great, my kids liked it. So we are packing and when we arrive at the airport Jonah is asleep, we thought he would sleep through the whole thing again, but just 1hr later he starts crying, my wife and i try to keep him calm, and even though it worked, it only did for almost 30mins.
He wanted to 'walk' but my wife and i tried to entertain him with his fave toys, but he was desperate to move. At this point he starts crying, but louder than the first time. I can see so annoyed faces but none of them made comments.
We played for him those baby sensory videos of fruits dancing, and he was distracted for 45 solid minutes; however he lost interest and again wanted to move from where we were, but we didn't let him, so the crying comes back. It was incredibly loud and i could see my wife frustrated and tired.
I try again with the sensory videos, toys, and everything i could think of, but nothing worked. Then a passenger gets up, i thought he was going to the restroom, though he approached us.
He started reclaiming my wife for 'our bad parenting' and demanded we control our baby. My wife annoyed told him that we are trying but he is overwhelmed. We are so sorry for upsetting him but we are trying. He said it wasn't enough, he is tired and wants to sleep but our baby doesn't let him. Again, my wife apologizes and at this point, he starts yelling at us.
He said stuff like 'Babies shouldn't be allowed to travel', 'We are irresponsible parents', and all kinds of nonsense. I asked him to lower his voice if he doesn't want to scare Jonah, but the dude was so mad and started insulting us. I just lose it and yell back at him, which didn't help because Jonah was crying at a higher pitch than before.
Then the flight attendant came and ask him to go back to his seat firmly. He leaves us alone but i can see a lot of people looking terribly at us. I try to ignore them and focus on my kid.
After a couple of minutes, he fells asleep and stayed like that. When we came back home, my wife called me an AH for arguing with the passenger, that i just scared our kid and made things worse. AITA?
Let's see what Reddit had to say on this.
awifred1100 writes:
I think NTA. If someone was berating my partner or if I had a kid my kid as well, I’d kick off. I’ve been on flights before with kids crying and it’s just a deal with it situation . It’s a kid, they cry, I get we don’t want to hear it but what are the parents meant to do, I would’ve gone to the defense of this family imo
nobleno writes:
NTA. Kids are allowed to exist in public. They cry sometimes. It’s annoying, yes, but so are most people. You got lucky on one half of the trip and unlucky on the other. The person causing a disturbance on the flight was the adult man who started yelling and created a scene, not your baby who cried intermittently.
valargamous writes:
YTA. While the passenger was unnecessarily rude, I will never understand why people bring young children on vacation with them. There is no reason that a two year old would need to go on a trip to Mexico.
Could you not find a babysitter? It probably would have been cheaper to pay for someone to watch him than to buy two plane tickets as well as anything else he would need on the trip. And WHY would you bring a two year old on a six hour plane ride? What about that sounds like a good idea to you?
Young children don't need to go on big vacations they won't enjoy or remember. As parents you should know that children are prone to getting tired easily and throwing temper tantrums, so why stress them out more by bringing them when they'd probably be just as happy at home.