In my experience, the mother tends to be fairly mortified herself—and, generally being closer to the screamer than anyone else is, would certainly make it stop if she could.
Screaming children test my patience too, but I’m really not sure screaming adults do much to resolve that. It’s always seemed to me that grace is the better part of maturity.
Sometimes you simply cannot control a screaming child easily and the only way is to let them be for a while. If you don't understand it, you are really immature and need to learn some basics about human society.
Let's push it a little farther than a screaming child. Something the parent can control is their child hitting the back of my seat. The only time I've ever said something to a parent on a flight was when that was happening, and after several warning looks over my shoulder that the mother ignored. And what I did wasn't shout. I basically turned around and hissed at them to control their child. That stopped it without drawing any excessive attention.
I’m a member of human society too. Me and 80% of the people on the plane can’t stand the selfishness but have the self-control not to say anything, because it’ll do no good anyway.
But if there were an airline that charged double for rejecting kids under the “shut up” age, I’d pay double for my seat and I bet I’m not alone.
> Me and 80% of the people on the plane can’t stand the selfishness
neither can I. But most of the people also understand that when a kid is crying, it is not out of parents' selfishness but rather helplessness.
> But if there were an airline that charged double for rejecting kids under the “shut up” age, I’d pay double for my seat and I bet I’m not alone.
The fact that no parent wants their child to keep crying is something that eludes you means you have very little social skills and you are amongst a tiny minority. If any airline ever proposes something like that, the backlash will be swift and massive.
> If any airline ever proposes something like that, the backlash will be swift and massive.
This is true. But it's not a condemnation of my position: if anything, it supports my level of frustration with the status quo.
Children are necessary and must be loved. At the same time, they (usually) don't need to be on airplanes if they can't be stopped from wailing for 9 straight hours (not an exaggeration- that's what happened on my Frankfurt flight).
There are medical flights and dying relatives and migrations and so on that are unavoidable. I was the wailing child on such a flight once, the pressure killing my ears. But that flight was entirely unavoidable.
And here's what you don't seem to get: people like me accept all of it if the parent is making any effort to stop it or console/distract the child, which is what my parents spent the flight doing.
Instead, we look at the parent sitting on their phone with earphones in while the kid is wailing next to them and curse society for normalizing this.
Screaming children test my patience too, but I’m really not sure screaming adults do much to resolve that. It’s always seemed to me that grace is the better part of maturity.
Sometimes you can get earplugs if you ask nicely.