Children on motherf'ing planes

Jake still doesn't get it, I'll give Mike some credit and say he gets it, but he's been lucky.

Taking children on planes is a problem; young children have short attention spans, are impatient and throw tantrums. Having taken my pair transcontinental a few times I know the issues, I've had a couple of medium sized incidents but nothing really bad. I've seen serious tantrums and hours of crying from children of other travelers. Including the little brat who batted the top of our heads, hard, for a whole 4 hours, and spilled his juice on my wife (someone else's sitting in the row behind us).

But, Jake is wrong:

Here is why kids fly: on my last trip, there was a ~ 4 year old traveling 2500 miles with her grandmother.
She was going to see her mum, who was convalescing on the east coast after being medevaced from Iraq. Non-combat injury, but bad enough that she's been told she won't deploy again abroad.
Grandma was taking her, because her dad is in Afghanistan until spring, at least.
Both her uncles are in Baghdad until summer.
She cried, but not much; she was very tired, and very hungry (United no longer serves meals); she climbed the seat, had to go potty more than once and asked for the seating arrangement to be changed twice. We accommodated her, she was overall quite well behaved.

It helped, I like to think, that I smiled at her, asked her name, told her about my girl and was generally polite and pleasant; ten years ago I might have glowered or ignored her, and I would have earned the resulting tantrum.
Number one rule when there are kids around you in airplanes: don't ignore them, smile and be pleasant and try to pretend they are actual human beings worthy of consideration and courtesy.

I've had some really bad flights: there was the foreign guy who somehow bypassed security screening and we had armed marshals run on board and drag him off, he probably still doesn't know why they did that, unless they found a japanese translator somewhere; there was the guy who had a panic attack as we pulled from the gate and rushed the door, they let him off after about 20 minutes, he wanted a refund, I expect he got it; the gentleman who confused TSA airline rules on transport of loaded guns with the 2nd amendment was also escorted off the plane, I'm sure he got a refund, but we had to wait half an hour while they found his bag and matched him to his guns (I checked, ammo does have to be separate from guns in the cargo hold, he was wrong); and, then there was the extremely obnoxious woman from Texas who got steadily drunk over the middle of the Atlantic; not sure which was the worst: when she hit the people around her (including us), when she stripped, when her husband locked himself in the toilet with the remaining liquor, or when she tried to storm the cockpit to "talk" to the pilot (pre 9/11, so she survived, but she was restrained, forcibly sedated and arrested on landing - but she did get home).

Odds are if someone is going to delay your flight, throw a tantrum or puke in gangway, it will be a grown up.

So grow up.