http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19735896/
Quote:
ATLANTA - A woman said she and her toddler son were kicked off a plane after she refused a flight attendant's request to medicate her son to get him to quiet down and stop saying "Bye bye, plane."
Kate Penland, of suburban Atlanta, said she and her 19-month-old son, Garren, were flying from Atlanta to Oklahoma last month on a Continental Express flight that made a stop in Houston.
As the plane was taxiing in Houston en route to Oklahoma, "he started saying 'Bye, bye plane,' Penland told WSB-TV in Atlanta. The flight attendant objected, she said.
"At the end of her speech, she leaned over the gentleman beside me and said, 'It's not funny anymore. You need to shut your baby up,'" Penland told WSB-TV in Atlanta.
When Penland asked the woman if she was joking, she said the stewardess replied, "You know, it's called baby Benadryl."
"And I said, 'Well, I'm not going to drug my child so you have a pleasant flight,'" Penland told the TV station.
Penland said other passengers began speaking up on her behalf, and the flight attendant announced they were turning around and that Penland and Garren were going to be taken off the plane.
Penland and her son were let off the plane and did not complete the trip to Oklahoma, said Kristy Nicholas, spokeswoman for Express Jet Airlines, which flies as Continental Express on behalf of Continental Airlines.
Attempts by the Associated Press to reach Penland under a telephone listing that matched her last name were unsuccessful.
"I was crying, I was upset and I was thinking, 'What am I going to do? I don't have anything with me, I don't have any more diapers for the baby, no juice, no milk," Penland told WSB.
Nicholas said, "We received Ms. Penland's letter expressing her concerns and intend to investigate its contents."
|
I don't know for sure, but i think that perhaps america has become a tad overly sensitive towards children. I could understand kicking a family off of a plane if the kid was screaming and the parent couldn't calm them down, but that doesn't really seem to be what was going on here.
What do you think? Have we reached a point where we're too sensitive about the existence of children? Where did the idea come from that we shouldn't have to deal with children acting like children in essentially public places? Would you have kicked this family off?
I wouldn't have.
I do know a lot of people who seem to steadfastly cling to the notion that children should be seen and not heard to the extent that when they see children behaving in perfectly normal ways they immediately attribute said behavior to a lack of parenting ability on the part of the parents. I guess that, as a parent, i have a difficult time finding sympathy for people who can't handle the ways in which children can be annoying.
It's not that i don't try to keep my kid well behaved, or that i won't leave a restaurant when the kid can't stop being noisy. It's just that if push came to shove i would choose letting my child behave in completely healthy and normal(though perhaps loud) ways over not annoying the fuck out of someone in a public place.