What is the tolerance level for kids?
Friday Jul 25, 2008
So much of the experience of a 10-hour international flight depends on your temporary neighbours, so I was a little anxious when finding out that the 2 seats next to me on my flight from Amsterdam to San Francisco were occupied by a mother with her 2 young kids. From experience, I know that the noise level can be quite high.
It turned out that this was quite OK, apart from some crying during take-off and landing (as expected), the kids were fairly quiet. However, that did not prevent them from being quite a nuisance. Both kids (I estimate at 4 and 2 years) were running around often, constantly bumping into me, the boy was swinging the headset, and hit me on a few occasions. I am pretty certain that he did some damage to the tray table on his seat.
And it was not only me who was bothered with this, as I saw stewardesses tell the mother to keep the children from wildly running around on at least 2 occasions.
Here's my dilemma: at what point is your tolerance point exceeded? When do you start to complain to the mother? At some point I was very close to talk to the mother, but then I saw how exhausted she looked, and I decided against it. I kept it to a few very stern looks at the boy. After all, it looked like the mom had more trouble than I had, and it was only 10 hours of my life.
What would you do in a similar situation? At what point do you decide to take action? And also, how high (or low) is your tolerance level for adults on flights?
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I've had a few of those...I gather only the 2 year...