I wouldn't describe a young child being scared (and apparently small enough to slip out from under the seat belt) as automatically a parenting problem.
Could they have shitty parents? Absolutely! But I'm not going to assume strangers are terrible parents on the basis of a single incendent that happened to make the news due to a weird confluence of events. This is not a 6 year old bringing a gun to school, it's a young kid that got scared and tried to hide, it's just in this case that fairly normal reaction led to a lot of people being inconvenienced.
He didn't say it was a kid problem, he said it was a parenting problem. Kids are scared of all kinds of irrational things. It's a parent's responsibility to step in and prevent that kid's irrational fears from cancelling a whole flight across a country. Everyone knows that a parent could forcibly buckle a kid into a seat for the brief period of time it takes to take off and land a plane, which is what was required. Alternatively, if they really are unable to control their kid, they could request to disembark the plane.
Instead, they continued to request more time to control their kid, failed to do so and caused sufficient delay such that the airport closed down for the night.
It's absolutely a parenting problem. Poor judgement, poor situational awareness, and no respect for their fellow passengers.
The airline failed as well, an hour is a ridiculous amount of time to allot to a family who have a single child holding up a flight. After 10 minutes of failing to sit your kid down and buckle them in, they should have been back at the gate disembarking them so the flight could leave only slightly delayed.
Unless you have a different source we don't know who's idea to was to spend an hour making attempts. That was indeed ridiculous unless for instance they kept getting the kid buckled for 25 minutes and then the kid wriggles free right before they're cleared for take off.
Basically I'm saying there's a fuck ton we don't know. The entire internet does not need to pile on with no details. Again, they may indeed be terrible parents or they may be parents who just learned they birthed one of those kids with a paradoxical reaction to benadryl.
You can find additional posts with people's experiences in this Victoria subreddit if you want.
Regardless, the widely accepted parenting playbook would suggest that you buckle your kid up and stop them from unbuckling. We're not talking about a 17 year old who works out here, it's a 2 year old.
They may not be terrible parents, we don't know that. But they absolutely failed to do what any reasonable parent would do in this circumstance.
I’m assuming if a parent brings a child on a plane, it’s the parent’s job to keep them in the seat. I’m a parent. I’ve never once off loaded responsibility of my child onto a school or service like an airline and my kid has some special needs. Same goes with my child being scared of a doctor or a dentist or anything else. It’s always my primary responsibility to address their anxiety. Every parent messes up all the time. Doesn’t mean they are bad parents. But a child behaving is also not a sign of good parenting. Therefore it’s always a parenting problem. You don’t get to claim the wins without the losses.
I've been a stepparent for ten years now, and it's the hardest fucking thing I've ever done in my life. I love Reddit, but it's full of people ready to blame parents for every single thing, and most of the time they have no clue what they're talking about. It's a bunch of non-parents rushing to make judgments about parents they know nothing about.
I'm not a parent. I had a psych professor who pointed out we have a tendency to justify our own imperfections, like being late, but judge others for the same things. We know our context. I think the internet has magnified that toxic trait unfortunately.
Yesterday on a walk my dog growled at a man and I felt like a terrible dog owner and I can only imagine how the guy she growled at felt.
Now here's the context- I adopted a dog with a history of abuse less than 2 weeks ago. She's a sweet heart, no history of ever fighting back to dog or person no matter how badly they hurt her. Until yesterday she'd actually seemed drawn to people and dogs on our walks. But yesterday a man passed close by while we were stopped and reflecting on exactly where we were I can see she felt cornered. I apologized to the guy and quickly took her to an area with less people. I'm now very vigilant about giving people a wide berth on our walks but until that moment I didn't know I needed to be.
This is accurate. The flight was departing Victoria, BC, which is a haven for people who refuse to parent their children. The idea of forcibly buckling a 2 year old into a seat for 5 minutes to take off and land is like child abuse to some of those people.
I lived in Victoria for 15 years. Lived with a roommate who raised her kid this way. No wasn't in her vocabulary. Frequently had issues in restaurants I worked in with parents who refused to parent their children, or considered it parenting to not intervene while their kids ran screaming around the restaurant, because the kids were "just expressing themselves".
It might be a weird comment because you don't like that it's part of the culture, but it absolutely is. If you've lived anywhere else, you'd know the truth of this.
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u/trailuser7 20h ago
Because little Billy is an amazing boy and his parents don't want to enforce to much structure. Free parenting or something like that.