Children cannot fully understand what is happening to them for many, many years. This goes so far beyond planes. They don’t understand why they got jerked forward when you slammed the brakes on a car, or why the buckle burned their arm on a hot summer day. They don’t understand why they get a shot at the doctor, they don’t understand why the stove is hot, they don’t understand any of this crap until they get older and are exposed. The problem is that in order to avoid these situations, the only viable solution is to ask every parent to live in a lockdown-lite mode for 3 to 4 years every single time they have a kid. Is that reasonable?

Parents have lives and families and obligations. Kids are along for the ride until they can exert their own autonomy. That’s how it has always been and that’s how it will continue to be.

This is the exact sort of take if you ever have a kid you will look back on and realize how ignorant it is.

You will not be worried about the baby in it's mother's arms if you crash land on a plane. In reality you don't want to be inconvenience. That's what happens when you live in a society full of different people though. Sometimes you have to wait as they load people in wheelchairs in planes. Sometimes a baby cries.

the discomfort in the ears becomes a non-issue if the baby sucks on something while it's happening because sucking helps readjust the pressure. having flown with a baby myself, we never had problems with that.

and if you want my personal opinion, anyone who feels crying babies are disruptive is an asshole. i am not saying that lightly. parents are not just flying for fun and letting their babies cry to torture you.

as a society we need to be more child friendly and supportive of parents. especially when they have a baby in distress. this whole idea that children should always be quiet and never bother adults is absurd, and only really found in western culture. that doesn't mean kids should be allowed to get away with anything, but a crying baby is not something that can just be stopped until the parents can identify the cause, and we should have some tolerance for that.

No one travels with babies for fun, visiting my terminally Ill mother over the several years of her decline was indeed a nightmare with young children, we would not have put ourselves through that otherwise.

Do you seriously think that parents are flying with infants for the lolz? The vast majority are not. It’s a major operation for both child and parents.

“What is so important that you need to take a baby on a plane” and “Have you thought about driving instead?” have got to be some of the most clueless and unempathic takes I’ve ever read. Ironic considering that’s what you’re accusing parents of.

> Where is SO important that you need to take a baby with you on a plane?

I would guess that in most cases, someone is flying with an infant because they are going somewhere important and traveling with their infant was the best option available to them.

Traveling by air (or at all) with an infant is not fun and I can’t imagine that ever being anyone’s first choice.

So when you see frazzled parents at the airport with their young children, assume the best and be kind.

It's incredible how many people are willing to treat young children as second class citizens because they don't want to be inconvenienced.

We have child-free hotels, child-free restaurantes, maybe now child-free airplanes...what's next, child-free cities?

I flew with my six month old a while back with no issues. Gave her a bottle on both the ascent and the descent so her ears would pop and that worked perfectly.

She slept like a baby for most of the 5 hour flight and only cried once for maybe 60 seconds when she got hungry and I had to prep a bottle.

It definitely didn't seem like "babies experience a lot of pain" holds true at all if you plan for it

>In this scenario, there isn't going to be evacuation. At best, it's search and rescue. At worst, search and recovery.

Scenarios without evacuations are ones where nearly everyone or everyone is already dead. That’s not a case to optimize for.

Not sure how much we need to optimize for this. Plane crashes are rare. I'm happy to risk a baby seat crashing into me if my plane crashes if it means the 99.99987% of the flights are slightly better.

I'll bet that is less of an issue than the issue of evacuation.

Currently, aircraft seatbelts are designed for very quick release when needed with no training or muscle memory needed, shove your hand at your waist and pull the metal flap and it immediately comes apart. This seems like it could be an issue with baby carriers, since a) you can probably expect a bit more complex arrangement of straps buckles and b) lack of muscle memory or training on presumably a different style of carrier than what you ever ever use outside an airplane.

A second issue that comes to mind, how to do seating arrangements? Imagine a parent struggling to remove baby during a emergency. Imagine a 3 seat row window side, where others are stuck waiting for parent to release baby.

This seems like a certification nightmare

I think the challenge here might be that, as the article says, this is all just hypothetical and hasn't been empirically tested. It also sounds like a lot of the reasoning predates modern babywearing equipment quite a bit.

With our kids, we used two different devices. One was just a long strip of cloth that you tie in a special way. The other was a more structured carrier with straps and buckles and all that good stuff. For both of them, the child faces toward the parent, so they would be rear-facing relative to the plane. And both have an option to fully support the head. The main purpose there is just to protect their neck while sleeping or during moderate activity, but it would offer at least some additional protection against neck injuries in a crash, rough landing, or during periods of turbulence.

Perhaps crush injuries are more likely with the baby strapped to you, but honestly I would be more worried about a parent holding their baby being more likely to drop them in the aisle during an evacuation, which would be more likely to endanger everyone behind them on the plane as well.

> Logically extrapolated, in this scenario, the airline becomes responsible for the baby's wellbeing. And I don't think that's a good place for the airlines to be?

Aren't airlines responsible for the well-being of everyone on a plane? That seems like it kind of goes with the territory of charging money for hurtling people across the sky in a giant metal box.

> Yes, but it wouldn't necessarily be easy to use or consumer friendly. The ideal solution would have the baby with their back facing front, and the attached carrier facing inwards towards the seat.

There is an existing international standard (ISO 13216) for child safety seats in cars:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isofix

It could be added to airplanes seats.

> For soft babywearing carriers, the outlook is also grim. The kinematics of the baby, adult, carrier and airplane seat lead to crush injuries that are worse than the poorly restrained arm hold version.

The point is that the "return" - in a vanishingly tiny number of cases, the kinematics is very slightly better (maybe I buy that it is slightly better, without doing research, but it can't possibly be much better) - is not at all worth the "investment" - every single parent of every single baby on every single flight having to put up with a very real annoyance.

You can't circle around this because simply put per million miles flew the fatality rate is significantly lower than that of driving

This sounds like a different problem than the one this post is about. For baby-in-lap, no one is being guilt tripped into switching seats because the baby doesn’t have a seat.

If you’re being guilt tripped into switching seats so that a family with a young child can sit together, consider blaming the airline for not automatically seating a young child next to their guardian.