If cigarettes are to be any guide, it won't be long before children are banned from planes, children have to stay 50 feet away from hospitals, and eventually most people stop having children at all.
Airlines offer no-crying sections
31–40 of 59 posts
Re: Airlines offer no-crying sections
#32Ear plugs and noise-canceling headphones (Bose QuietComfort for example) work really really well. Turn up the music/white noise to get past the ear plugs just a little bit. No sounds get past this.
It gets quite tiring to blast high volume music or white noise for long periods. (And the noise-cancelling is utterly useless for screams.)
Why is noise canceling useless for screams?
Re: Airlines offer no-crying sections
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the child is in a group of other humans, the louder it cries the more likely it is to be noticed. The more annoying the cry is to other people, the more likely it is to get help. Humans always lived in groups, so being loud and annoying has huge evolutionary advantages over being quiet.
They mostly cry without any reason watsoever. Even today children crying gets them shaken violently in some cultres. I can't imagine pre-historic humans to be more well-tempered and tolerant than today. It doesn't make sense.
> They mostly cry without any reason watsoever.
Not knowing the reason is not the same as without reason. A child may cry for seemingly silly reasons (there's an excellent Tumblr blog "reasons my son is crying") but there's generally a reason.
Re: Airlines offer no-crying sections
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Taking a baby onto an airplane is equivalent to torturing it... And, as a consequence, everyone around it.
1000 times this. When airplane starts to descend my ears do funny thing. I begin to hear everything like from under a meter of water. My ears also hurt like hell. And it doesn't stop. On my first flight ever, I suffered for half an hour waiting for this feeling to pass. No amount of swallowing helped. Then I told my friend about it and he ssugested that I blow the air out through the nose while holding it shut with m…
> If you could somehow do this manouver to an infant that started crying on descent.... Otherwise you are funding him about an hour of really painful torture.
Chewing/swallowing tends to accomplish the same thing, which is why it's recommended to give them a bottle during takeoff/landing.
Re: Airlines offer no-crying sections
#35It would seem to me a much simpler solution would be for airlines to offer earplugs on all flights. That way, babies can cry and businessmen don't whine.
If smoking is a problem for non-smokers, would it seem like a simpler solution to give non-smokers face masks?
Why should the burden of the negative externality lie on the recipient and not the creator of said externality?
The market will sort it out. I would pay more, lots of people would pay more. The demand curve speaks louder than words.
Re: Airlines offer no-crying sections
#36If cigarettes are to be any guide, it won't be long before children are banned from planes, children have to stay 50 feet away from hospitals, and eventually most people stop having children at all.
We, as members of society, are putting less pressure on each other to reproduce, probably because our society's tech level & processes can't support many more humans than currently exist.
Re: Airlines offer no-crying sections
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Taking a baby onto an airplane is equivalent to torturing it... And, as a consequence, everyone around it.
1000 times this. When airplane starts to descend my ears do funny thing. I begin to hear everything like from under a meter of water. My ears also hurt like hell. And it doesn't stop. On my first flight ever, I suffered for half an hour waiting for this feeling to pass. No amount of swallowing helped. Then I told my friend about it and he ssugested that I blow the air out through the nose while holding it shut with m…
FYI, this is how scuba divers clear their ears as they change depths. It's basic training.
Re: Airlines offer no-crying sections
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Taking a baby onto an airplane is equivalent to torturing it... And, as a consequence, everyone around it.
My sarcasm meter might be off, but regardless, this is nonsense. You can easily mitigate the pressure issues by giving your kid something to snack on or a bottle during takeoff and landing.
All three of our children have been very happy to fly. They seem to find the engine noise soothing when they're infants, and out 4-year-old loves machines, so he's been thrilled anytime we get on a plane anytime for the past few years.
That said, I'd be happy to be put in a "family friendly" part of the cabin, and leave other audibly sensitive travelers to their piece.
It surprises me how poorly airlines integrate lap infants into their booking process. Often with domestic carriers there's no way to indicate that you're bringing an infant with you until you get to the checkin counter. Seems like poor planning.
Re: Airlines offer no-crying sections
#39Pretty lame for society to be so intolerant of children. Was everyone just born into adulthood complete with manners?? Smh.
What? Really? This is the main conclusion you draw from this article? Society isn't intolerant of children, society sees that there is a market for increased comfort in airlines, and that "peace and quiet" is an integral part of comfort. They aren't charging more for children to fly.
That's the real solution, charge more for small children and use the extra charge to reduce prices of the seats nearby. It should be prohibitively expensive to bring a crying child on the plane.
Re: Airlines offer no-crying sections
#40Having used Etymotic in-ear headphones for well over a decade, I won't get on a plane without them. As in, I once drove back to the office at 4am the morning before an early flight because I realized I'd left them there.
Assuming you've got a good fit, they act as -25dB earplugs with no music playing. Playing music at a moderate volume over that provides a huge masking effect[1] to external sound. Cranky babies, loud talkers, aircraft noise, etc. are all muted to nonexistent or at least very tolerable levels. About the only thing that gets through in my experience is the "bass effect" of a child kicking the back of my seat...
Other brands of in-ear monitors (IEMs) should work fine as well. The key is to ensure you use eartips that provide a good seal and comfortable fit. Most brands ship with different size tips, and you should make sure you can get replacements in your size. The eartips do wear out and need replacement with regular use. In my case, I mostly notice that they start getting oddly uncomfortable.
[1] As in "psychoacoustic masking principle", also leveraged to "hide" quantization noise in lossy audio codecs, ala MP3, AAC, etc.