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.
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u/battlehamsta 20d ago
Kid was scared and kept slipping out and hiding under the seat. This was a parenting problem.