Flying with Children…and Surviving
In my opinion, parents on airplanes fall into a few different groups.
Group A you feel bad for and can't completely hate because they are trying their best to alternatively wrangle and entertain their little angels to keep the damage to a minimum.
Group B you hate but at the same time have a little bit of sympathy for, because you quickly assess that their child is Damian from The Omen and he is uncontrollable under any circumstance.
Group C you are envious of because they are the parents of five kids on board all sitting nicely, completely entertained by their one toy they were allowed to bring on the ten hour flight. So few are actually in this group that we can’t help but resent and secretly admire them more than hate them. Group C are not really mortals anyway.
And last but not least, the most hated group of all…the parents who either are in denial or just don't care. The children of this group fight with their siblings and kick the back of your chair the entire flight as the parents continue to read their magazines and never look up when you peer through the crack between the seats, shooting them dirty looks. I'm convinced their motto is, "Chances are good that we’ll never see you people again, so glare all you want! I'm not looking up even once from Star Tracks!"
I pray that if you are on an airplane with my brood you place us in Group A. I hope it's more traumatizing for my husband and me than for the other passengers on our airplane. I don't want to eliminate our kids’ trauma as well, because I can assure you we do our best to inflict an exponential amount of trauma on them as they inflict on the rest of the trapped passengers.
But since they are still young and the full effects of trauma doesn't show up for years to come, it's too hard to measure how they are faring at this point. Note to self: when they are adults and I'm still writing about them in order to capitalize on their lives, include their mental health statuses.
When my daughter was two-and-a-half, my husband's family decided to take us all on a family trip to Hawaii. It was exciting and horrifying all at the same time. How naïve we were to be terrified of traveling with just one child since we now travel with three. We live in NYC, so the thought of being on a plane straight through to Hawaii with her was paralyzing. We opted to change planes in LA in order to divide our travel time so the passengers wouldn’t have time to galvanize and organize a plan to chuck her out of the emergency door. We decided it would be in her best interest to start over fresh with another group midway through.
In the weeks leading up to this trip, my panic boiled over. In my pre-mommy life, I was the no-child traveler who inevitably ended up with the kid who ruined my flight and I silently wished nasty things upon both kid and parent. I actually had a baby throw up on me once. I would categorize myself in the top 2% of kid-on-plane dreaders. So I was convinced that all the bad karma I had been sending out about other people’s kids all these years was now going to come back to haunt me.
I had to make a plan.
I called my friend who had flown with her daughter and asked what to do. Her answer was unexpected and secretly the one I was hoping for, "Drug her if you have to."
Yes, that's right; drug her if you have to. It's the only responsible thing a parent mid-flight can do.
Did I just say that?
It's the only responsible thing a parent can do?!?
I was so relieved that someone before me had thought of it first. She suggested Children’s Benedryl, which apparently every parent knows makes kids tired. She also suggested a trial run to see how it worked if I had never given Benedryl to her before. I gave her a small dose of Benedryl one afternoon before a nap and within twenty minutes she was awake and running around the room like I had given her speed. I guess, in fact, I had given her speed as I was later told that a small percentage of kids who take Benedryl react that way. Plane full of people, be so thankful I did not blow off the trial run.
The next drug of choice was another over the counter drug. Ask your friends "in the know" what it is, but I don't want to start a drug problem among toddlers by giving up the name. Well, they didn’t make a children’s version of this concoction, so I called my doctor and told her my plight so I could find out the correct dosage for my innocent baby.
She began telling me that she doesn't really condone drugging your child and went on to suggest that we should buy her a few new toys and games and yummy snacks and that should keep her busy enough to be fine on the plane.
Are you kidding me?
Like I hadn't already bought out freaking Toys R Us for this flight and enough candy to rot out every tooth in the child's mouth. Drugging her wasn’t Plan A. In a perfectly panicked, but yet controlled voice, I thanked her for her ridiculous advice and told her I wasn't asking for an ethics lesson, but just the dosage so I don't OD my child 30,000 feet in the air or the next best thing might be for her to come on the flight with me and she can hold her the whole ten hours!!
She gave me the dosage.
As we boarded the flight to Los Angeles I looked around at all the faces looking at me with such disdain. We were the enemies. As we walked down the aisle I could almost hear sighs of relief when we were clear of their zone. But our presence at all, anywhere on the plane, was clearly not welcomed. I wanted to scream back, "I know, I know, I don"t blame you! But don't fear us. I came prepared with a clear Plan B and will not hesitate to shift to it if need be!"
We got lucky on this maiden voyage. The movie was mercifully "Finding Nemo" and afterward she was, in fact, entertained by the hundreds of dollars of new toys I had purchased. We made it through all four flights there and back to NYC and didn’t have to knock her out even once. When we were departing the plane at Kennedy and I let my body relax for the first time in what felt like days, I caught eyes with a woman. She said, "Your daughter was amazing. You would have never known she was on the plane. I was so scared when we saw her for fear of a screaming baby the whole time."
As a parent, one might have been annoyed by her backhanded compliment, but I really wasn’t because I got it 100%.
I now have three kids and it is not as practical to go to Plan B for us any more because with only two parents we cannot carry three “sleeping” children off a plane. Ironically, I never had to resort to using it, but up until child #3 came along, I kept some handy just in case. Incidentally, I want to take this opportunity to apologize to the people on an American Airlines flight during Christmas of 2007 from Ft. Lauderdale to Newark, forgot the goods and it definitely would have been handy that flight.
That being said, on your next flight, if you see us coming your way, I promise we are doing everything in our power to control them within the limits of the law.
Godspeed and stay strong Group A!
Author: Shari Dabby
