Passenger endured hours of toddler screams and loud music on a flight — the parents’ response when a flight attendant stepped in made it worse
If you're seated near a screaming child on a flight, you already know it's going to be a long journey. But things can get even more frustrating when the parents don't seem willing to do much to keep the noise under control. For a one traveler, who goes by u/New-Whereas-1043 on Reddit, a five-hour flight from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles became especially frustrating when a young child kept screaming and playing loud music while the parents did almost nothing to stop it. The passenger shared the experience on September 14, 2026, and revealed the surprising response the parents gave to the flight attendant when she asked them to control the noise.
Parents let their kid scream and blast toy music for a 4-hour flight, parents did nothing—am I crazy for being furious?
by u/New-Whereas-1043 in EntitledPeople
The passenger explained that they boarded a 5-hour flight, and after 30 minutes into the flight, a kid around 3-4 years old started screaming "hysterically." The passenger said that they understood flying can get rough on kids, but the parents did not try to calm him down. Instead, they handed him an iPad with loud kids' music playing and did not even plug in headphones. According to the passenger, they let him listen to the music at full volume, and the kid blasted it repeatedly. When the passenger asked the flight attendant to help request that the parents calm the kid down, they simply responded: "We can't do anything to control him, so we just have to let him scream and play." So for the next 3 hours, as they said, "it was a tag-team of full-volume toddler meltdowns and blaring electronic toy noise."
The passenger questioned whether this was becoming normal on flights, writing that "kids will be kids" shouldn't mean parents simply give up and expect everyone else to deal with the noise. They also wondered how passengers were now allowed to play loud audio devices without headphones for hours on a plane. Other Reddit users also had plenty to say in the comments, with some joking about how they would prepare for a similar situation. u/Leebelle3 wrote, "We’ve done nothing, and we’re all out of ideas."
They added, "Parent is a verb- it would be nice if more people understood that." Meanwhile, u/buckeye-person had a much simpler solution and wrote, "Note to self: Take noise-canceling headphones if I ever fly again." And u/BungleBums joked about a solution of their own, writing, "Petition for the last two rows to be behind soundproof glass and the only people seated there are screaming children and parents." The passenger also replied to comments saying they had already put on earphones, but the screaming and loud music were so bad that they could still hear everything. What really got to them was that the parents didn't seem to realize how much their behavior was affecting more than a hundred other people stuck on the same flight.
Parents can sometimes struggle to keep young children calm during a flight, but their response can make a big difference to the people around them. On another Vietnam Airlines flight, a man named Paul Lee found himself seated beside a crying toddler who repeatedly kicked him. Lee chose not to confront the mother and instead put on his headphones and waited for the disturbance to pass, but viewers were still surprised when the mother barely tried to stop the child or apologize.