Our Travel website here at IOL is usually a quiet and gentle place, devoted to fab destinations and pretty pictures.
But this week, all hell broke loose.
We carried an opinion piece from Katy Holland of the London Independent on Sunday, talking about the difficulties of plane travel with small children.
Katy describes how the stress of air travel with kids is made worse by the constant worrying about what other passengers think.
She concludes: “Children are becoming increasingly demonised by adults. I know not all children (or parents) are angels, but if adults think it's acceptable simply to banish them, give them “evil stares”, swear at them, or break out into an almighty rage, it's not surprising that our offspring think it's perfectly acceptable to have a tantrum too.”
And then came the comments from our readers - here’s a venomous sampling:
* Personally I wouldn't allow kids under 10 on planes at all.
* Perhaps you should leave your catawauling brats at home. I don't see why I should be disturbed, whether it be in a restaurant, plane or anywhere else by your ill-behaved offspring.
* If you don't know how to control your children don't bring them on a plane. Whenever I fly I am supposed to hit the ground running, this is almost impossible to do when you have just completed a 16 hour flight where a child has been disturbing everyone. There are medications available for travelling with unruly children, use them. I am 100% for flights that don't allow children.
* I for one would be willing to pay extra not to listen to your badly behaved brats.
Clearly, there is a lot a rage around this issue.
I’ve done a fair bit of business travel - with the rock-bottom experience being the three-hour delayed flight from Jozi to Cape Town that included the man next to me who sniffed every three minutes for the whole flight - and a baby that cried the whole two hours.
I’ve also done long-haul flights with a two-and-a-half year old boy who is fondly known as the Duracell Bunny for his endless energy. And can I mention that that CT-London-CT trip coincided with the plot that shut down Heathrow and started the ban on liquids on flights, so that the medication I had used on the outbound flight had to be binned going home - and there were no snacks that I could take on that hellish flight, as at that point the security crackdown was total. And in all of that, I promise I did not let him kick the seat in front of him.
And it has to be said on a lot of flights I have found myself mentally tutting at some mother or father who just lets their child(ren) do anything he or she likes.
But generally, the anti-child-flight brigade need to understand that there is no reasonable parent, anywhere, who would willingly enter a small, confined and crowded space with their child and then hang out there for several (or many hours). And no matter how strict a parent you are, there are times when a small child will get wriggly and whiny. And no one can predict when a small baby will cry.
So, let’s lighten the load of beauty queens everywhere and promote world peace by sharing our best tips on a) surviving a flight with your own child and/or b) surviving a flight with someone’s else’s child. Use the comment form below...