Joe was on an airplane sitting next to a mother and child. The child was making a mess playing with glitter so he said something and she yelled at him for trying to parent her child. So he called a flight attendant over to make the girl stop. She did, but she cried and screamed the rest of the flight. Would you say something if a mother was letting her child play with glitter in a public space?
Ayla Brown: All right. Good morning, Joe. What happened on your plane? You e-mailed me about it, so what did you do?
Joe: I was on a flight recently and I was sitting on the aisle seat and seated next to me in the middle seat and the window seat was a mother and her daughter. The mother was in the middle seat and the daughter was on the window. The daughter was about probably five or six years old. She didn’t bother me so much but I kind of noticed throughout the flight, she was playing with a lot of glitter, you know, like she’s kind of at that age. And it was just it was getting absolutely everywhere.
Ayla Brown: Glitter is difficult. By the way, as a girl who’s played with glitter, it literally gets on your skin and it’s like it doesn’t leave for 16 days.
Joe: Yeah. It’s sticky. It was sticking to like the tray table and the window and the floor and it’s all over the place. And this girl’s kind of in her own world and not being super loud, minding her own business. But I’m kind of looking at it like, what? This is going to cause such an issue for the people working on the plane. This is also so inconsiderate, you know? And so, halfway through and I kept thinking about, should I do something? Should I not? And we got to about 40 minutes left in the flight.
Ayla Brown: And you said something.
Joe: I just asked I asked the mom like, hey, you know, maybe you should tell her to not cause this mess and she snapped at me.
Ayla Brown: How dare you parent my child?
Joe: Yeah, exactly. How dare you tell me what to do. Who the hell are you? You know? Yeah. And I was like, I get it, I guess. But still, this is a mess. And so I called a flight attendant and I was like, hey, can you tell her? Yeah, I was one of those people. Hey, can you just tell them to knock it off because this is a mess? And she did. And so for the last 30 minutes, the girl was glitter less.
Ayla Brown: So she was a perfectly good kid on the plane. As a parent, you know, that’s all you want is your children is to be well occupied.
Joe: And I’m sitting there the whole time thinking feeling a little bad. But I did the right thing. I’m the good guy here. And nobody else said anything around me. But I more did it for the people working on the plane because they have to clean it after the flight. But then, I went home to my wife and she was like, Why would you do that? Like, why would you rob this child of comforting joy on a flight when she’s causing nobody else any issues? And we’ve talked about having kids and starting a family eventually. And she’s like, what kind of a dad are you going to be if you’re not going to be able to let your kids do things that comfort them. And I’m fine with kids having little things to comfort them. But I feel like there needs to be an agreed upon social contract of we don’t, you know, mess public spaces like that when we respect the fact that people that work on these planes have a lot to do.
