Man Asks If He Was Wrong For Yelling At The Mother Of Rowdy Children On His Flight
No matter how smooth the ride is or how good the in-flight entertainment options are, flying is always a stressful affair. Naturally, people aren't typically on their best behavior in stressful situations, so arguments that will embarrass everyone involved later can easily break out. That's possible even when everyone's trying to get along.
However, a flight can only get worse when someone has no regard for their fellow passengers. When people are stuck in the air together, their frustrations can easily reach a boiling point. Although everyone can understand why one man hit his limit for rude behavior, his response nonetheless sparked some debate.
Setting the scene
As one man who has since deleted his Reddit account said on the platform, he was on a flight to New York City from London and was seated near the aisle at the middle section of the plane.
Before long, a woman brought her two young sons who were close in age into the row behind him. One of the boys sat directly behind the man and the woman's husband was in the row behind her. It doesn't take long for things to get loud.
A point the man wanted to clarify
Since it would become important to their interactions, the man wanted to clarify that everyone involved in the situation he was about to describe is ethnically Indian. The man also said that this fact is relevant to an aspect of the situation that he finds personally embarrassing.
Although the man said there are often prejudicial reasons why his people are looked down upon during travel, he said he's nonetheless noticed a pattern of kids acting rambunctiously on flights he's taken to and from India. He also described the parents of these children as being too checked out to pay attention to what they're doing.
The man's suspicions were quickly confirmed
As soon as the plane started taking off, the boys behind the man started making noise. Although he didn't make out most of the excited yelling, the kids shouted that they were having the best day ever - although the man didn't see it. That way, he didn't talk to them.
Since they weren't specifically targeting him, he decided to put in his headphones and tune them out. Since he was able to pay attention to the in-flight entertainment, he figured the children's yelling would make them a minor annoyance at worst.
The kids up the ante
However, the man found he couldn't ignore the world behind his screen for long after something started digging into his back. No matter how much he moved, this uncomfortable object was moving with him.
As it turned out, the culprit was the feet of the kid behind him. Although he wasn't kicking the seat exactly, he had his feet jammed into the back of it. This led the man to ask the boy's mother to tell him not to sit that way. She obliged.
The respite is only brief
Although about an hour passed without incident after this point, that didn't mean the matter was resolved. That's because the man noticed something bumping into his seat again. Again, the child behind him wasn't technically kicking his seat. However, that didn't stop him from finding a way to be annoying.
Instead of kicking, the child was repeatedly hitting the back of the man's seat with his hands. The man asked the mother to address her son's behavior again, which prompted her to roll her eyes. Nonetheless, she complied once again.
It wasn't over then either
Although the child stopped hitting the seat with his hands, he seemed to find a new way to aggravate the man each time. Although nothing struck the man's seat, he kept feeling it move back and forth. Unsurprisingly, the child was responsible for this.
What was he doing? Apparently, he had graduated from hitting the man's seat to opening and closing his tray table over and over again. As far as the man could tell, there was no reason for the kid to do this besides boredom.
The man reached his breaking point
After dealing with the child's shenanigans for the third time, the man was officially fed up and turned around to yell at the woman in Hindi. Roughly translated, he said, "Are you from a village?! Have you never flown before?!"
He didn't give her a chance to answer and continued his rant. As he added, "Please discipline your children and tell them to stop messing with my seat! People like you give Indian travelers a bad name, and that is why people don't like traveling with us!"
The children's father finally intervenes
Since a stranger was yelling at his wife, the man seated behind his family asked what was going on in English. In response, the man said that his outburst was due to the fact that this was the third time he had to get the children to stop bothering him.
The father seemed to take this seriously and scolded the kids in what the man described as a harsh tone. Although the mother looked at the man angrily, he said the kids stopped bothering him after he turned around again.
The reason for his dilemma
That's likely where the man expected his story to end. Since he finally got the result he wanted, it would be hard for satisfaction not to replace whatever frustration he felt. However, her started to feel differently once he spoke to his mother.
When he spoke to her on the phone after returning home, she told him that it wasn't nice to yell at the woman and that he shouldn't have done so. With that in mind, he asked Reddit whether she was right.
The knee-jerk reaction was fairly predictable
At first, this was a pretty simple judgement call for most people. As one commenter put it, "You did what you had to do to get them to stop messing with your chair. The results speak for themselves."
Although another person said he could have achieved those results without yelling, others quickly disagreed. As they saw it, he had already tried that and the children persisted without their mother showing much regard for the man's situation. What else was he supposed to do?
Others were very concerned with decorum
As a rule, some commenters agreed with the man's mother. In their view, there was no reason for him to lose his temper in public. They also didn't feel the kids' behavior warranted his reaction. That wasn't a terribly popular opinion but multiple people nonetheless expressed it.
Naturally, this led others to ask what they would have done in that situation, if the man was so wrong. They replied that they would have contacted a flight attendant once the children were bothering him for a third time.
The only other alternative anyone could think of
Although Reddit user PuckGoodfellow believed the man was in the right, they suggested talking to the kid directly next time rather than going through his mother. In similar situations, they typically turn around and tell the kid to keep their hands and feet to themselves.
Since a stranger is talking to them, that's usually enough to make the kid feel self-conscious enough to stop. As this person said, "Just be polite about it. They're kids, they don't know any better. But they can absolutely learn!"
Other commenters start to get uncomfortable
While some commenters were uncomfortable about what the man was saying about his fellow Indians, they deferred to his own experiences as an Indian-American. However, another commenter suggested that this specific identification was coloring the man's perspective.
As they said, "Your generalization of Indian stereotypes is frankly concerning. Your anecdotal evidence doesn't make a statistic. You clearly think you're better than the rest of Indians, for some reason." Another user expressed that this wasn't the only problem with how the man characterized the travelers.
Nobody has a monopoly on obnoxiousness
While some were uncomfortable about the man's cultural comments, others rejected the notion that the fact that the man and the family he confronted were Indian was relevant at all. They also rejected the idea that any one race behaves worse on planes than the others.
As one commenter put it, "I have had children of every possible ethnic or cultural background do what that kid did to you. Literally no difference. It has nothing to do with their country of origin."
Some thought he was being elitist
Echoing these sentiments, another user said, "In general, Americans of Indian origin despise Indians from India. That's one of the reasons why they act harsh towards Indians from India. Classist behavior I would say."
Although this user acknowledged they weren't there and that the family sounded genuinely annoying, the "village" comment seemed to rub them the wrong way. This "classist" perception of the man seemed to resonate among other commenters. However, there were others who were happy to come to his defense.
The problem could be generational, rather than regional
After enough people had levied similar accusations at the man, other commenters who are also of Indian descent backed up his experiences. One of them suggested that the trend they're seeing is more prevalent among younger generations, as what they're seeing doesn't match how they grew up.
In this person's words, "Idk how all these modern Indian kids act like this, my parents would have murdered me on the plane if someone had to look back twice to get me to stop being a jerk. Strangers wouldn't need to parent your kids if you did it yourselves."
Others were willing to defend the "village" comment
Others didn't feel it was fair to describe the man as classist for his "village" comment. Those who felt this way likened what he was saying to a figure of speech that's more familiar to Americans.
As one user put it, "Is that the Indian equivalent of 'were you born in a barn?' That's how I took it, and I’d say that phrase is extremely common." Another commenter said that it was a little more pointed and the equivalent of "Were you raised in a trailer?"
The man responds to this criticism
After this discussion had gone on for long enough, the man acknowledged those who labeled him a classist. He explained that this was not why he asked them if they were from a village, as nothing about their clothes or anything else he could identify indicated they were actually from a small village.
In his words, "I used the world 'gaonwalon,' which does literally translate to villagers, but as one of the commenters below asked, this is more akin to asking someone if they were born in a barn, not literally implying that they were from a village."
The family had their chance
With these side matters having been largely settled, discussion focused back on the primary matter at hand. As many commenters noted, the only reason the man had resorted to yelling was that more diplomatic attempts to address the kids' behavior had failed.
As one commenter put it, "After 3 warnings you were more than justified to tell off the mother." As they saw it and what the man's mother didn't seem to understand was that just because the woman he encountered was indignant, that didn't make her right.
People found it hard to blame the kids
On some level, people could sympathize with the kids. Based on their exciting yelling, they likely hadn't been on a plane before and if they were particularly young, that excitement would be hard to contain. It's hard to even blame them for the annoying behavior, as it's hard not to get fidgety when that excitement turns to boredom.
However, that doesn't make it any easier to actually deal with children when they act half-feral, kick people's chairs, or scream and sing at the top of their lungs. Since flying is already stressful, that extra irritation can become outright maddening.
The problem is parenting
Of course, a child's obnoxious behavior on a plane has a way of getting people curious about how the parents are responding to it. It's one thing if the parent seems embarrassed and overwhelmed by their kids' behavior but that was hardly how the man would describe the mother he encountered.
This was something commenters noticed. As one of them said, "It really does sound like she's a lazy parent. If someone asks her one time to get her kid under control, she should keep an eye on him the entire flight. Obviously she simply didn't care."
It was due to a lack of action, not a lack of control
It was also hard to describe the woman's inaction as helplessness. After all, her dirty looks at the man indicated she saw nothing wrong with her children's behavior. However, the biggest confirmation for this occurred after her husband intervened.
After all, the bad behavior stopped right after he scolded them. As one commenter pointed out, "The mom was aware of what her child was doing and deliberately ignoring it. When you blew up at her it stopped, which tells you it could have been stopped in the first place."
Another good point about the man's handling of things
Although one commenter didn't feel equipped to comment about the man's statements regarding his culture, there was one aspect of the situation that showed the man was still being more restrained than he could have been. It was clear when he spoke to the mother for the last time.
As this person said, "I don't think you did or said anything wrong, especially since you opted to say it in Hindi instead of English so probably less people understood therefore making it a more isolated incident."
An unanswered question
Although most of the discussion focused on either the issue at hand or the man's other comments, there were a couple of commenters who were requesting additional details. Among them, the biggest question was whether the man was reclining his seat.
Sadly, he didn't answer, but those who asked figured he got what he should have expected if he did. As one user put it, "A woman tried this with my 12 month old baby who kept kicking her seat. She looked at me, I looked right back and she put her seat up. Once it was out of the baby's kick zone her seat was left alone. A miracle."
The perspective he was likely looking for
Although some commenters judged the man for blowing up, others were actually impressed with how patient he had been up to that point. As some admitted, the children would not have made it to three incidents before they let their uglier sides out.
As one such user stated, "You had more patience than me. It was like the third time of having to ask this mother to control her kids at some point it's just rude. You did what you had to do."
Other parents weren't sympathetic to the woman, either
Although some commenters felt inclined to give the mother some grace as her children acted out, some parents didn't agree that she deserved any credit. They said that for those who are actually willing to put in the work to parent, it's not as hard as it seems.
As one user put it, "I've flown with my youngest, cross country. It’s really not that difficult to keep them quiet, contained, and entertained once they’re above toddler age, if you’re paying attention and actually parenting your kids."
Even those who might empathize didn't sympathize
As other parents described it, getting their kids not to fidget in ways that are disruptive to other people is more of a battle for them. Yet, while some might expect them to be sympathetic to the woman, they also said they resent other parents for not fighting that battle.
In the words of one commenter, "I spend so much time making sure my 8yo isn't messing with people's seats. It is almost non-stop when we are at a game or flying. I hate that others don't do the same."
The parents should have been better prepared
For both groups of parents, however, it's clear what needs to happen for a child to travel without bothering the other passengers. Whether they're excited, bored, or scared during the flight, they need distractions.
There's always going to be a little friction because flights only get more uncomfortable and boring for kids the longer they go on. Yet, commenters pointed out that the kid's issues will only worsen if there are no snacks or forms of entertainment to keep them occupied.
The man was harsh but most people felt he was justified
While some people thought the man was overly harsh and others were disturbed by his other comments and views, few were terribly impressed with the family he encountered either. For this reason, there were as many people who cheered him as criticized him, if not more.
In the words of one user, "People like us are a necessary evil. While you embarrassed a mother in front of her children, she probably was never going to learn otherwise." If nothing else, it made the rest of the man's flight peaceful.
Ultimately, the consensus was that he was in the right
Whether they were limiting their verdict to the specific matter the man was asking about or agreed with everything he said, the majority of commenters felt that he was not the problem in his situation. The lack of care the kids' parents showed until he made a scene outweighed anything the man said or felt, in their eyes.
It's hard to tell whether any of their words will be convincing to the man's mother but he will likely find the verdict satisfying either way. Nobody better kick his seat from this day forward.
