Dads flying with kids

Summer is a time for travel and likely involves flying with kids (article in the New York Times). When it comes to crying babies, I always say, let them cry it out. Babies and kids are more sensitive to air pressure than adults during takeoff and landing and little ears sometimes have to bear very strong pain. Having a pacifier or a milk bottle nearby and ready is often the only thing you can do, other than passing him or her over to mom. As a frequent flyer, I feel the pain of fellow travelers hoping to sleep, read or work, but as a dad, my only real sympathy goes to the kids and to the moms and dads traveling with them. Traveling with kids is never easy, no matter how much you love them, but it shouldn’t be made any harder by the stares and comments of other travelers, who, of course, were babies once themselves. Of course, none of this sympathy holds true when I catch junior committing the only real egregious sin of airplane travel: kicking my seat. If mom and dad don’t stop him after he does it once, you have every right to coldly stare at the parents and even to ask them to be more considerate parents. Bad etiquette in children is never the fault of the child.