It is past time to ban lap infants on planes

Parent Cafe
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I see a lot of infants in my office in nyc and it is the most amazing thing! The one that my kids had was a hard car seat on tiny wheels that broke constantly, and we thought it was the best thing ever.

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If you bought the seat, you’d always know it was available and thus possible to keep them strapped in just like if in a car. That is what the OP was suggesting, that all passengers need to be ticketed, in their own FAA approved seat. Maybe they could offer half priced seats to infants since they don’t weigh as much and don’t use as much fuel?

So many places now say all need tickets - concerts, movies, theater, sporting events. At the Superbowl, everyone requires a ticket and gets a seat, even newborns. Even players’ have to pay for their kids. I don’t think it is unreasonable for airlines (or the FAA) to have the same rule of a ticket for everyone.

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How many children under two are injured due to sitting on a parent’s lap per mile traveled by plane? How does that compare to how many children are injured in vehicle crashes per mile traveled by car? Should we attempt to eliminate even very small risks? At what cost?

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But why should an infant get to go for free on a plane but not a 2 year old? How many 2 year olds are injured due to sitting on a parent’s lap (and many of them do just after takeoff)? When my daughter was 2, she weighed 18 pounds, while my brother was 25 pounds at 3 months. She would have been just fine on my lap but the airlines said no, she needed a ticket. Why make an age exception and not a size exception? She was in a car seat until she was 8 or 9 years old in a car because that was the law (needed to be 56" tall) Why, because a child in a car seat is SAFER than a child not in a car seat. Not 100% safe, but safer.

It is safer for infants to have their own seats on planes. Safer. It’s just not cheaper for the parent. It is more comfortable for other passengers who may be in the same row to not have an extra passenger in that row. As I said, maybe the airlines could give a discount for an infant.

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I agree. All the arguments for and against car travel vs plane travel, and hence under 2 yrs traveling without seats, apply to over 2 also, and the airlines have already decided that the cutoff is 24 months, arbitrarily. I’d say it’s time to move that down, maybe to 6 months, maybe to 6 weeks. Perhaps the right approach would be to chip away at it, gradually.

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Really, there are bigger worries about air travel right now, like parts falling off airplanes.

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Thanks! My son ended up buying my 12 month old GD her own seat because 12 hours flight is too much with lap infant

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And if a lap child had been in that row when the door fell off


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If anyone had been in that row when the door fell off. Casualties aren’t limited to lap children.

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And parents who can afford to buy a seat can certainly do so. So why force the poor to choose between not seeing their relatives, driving with a much higher chance of injury, or incurring debt? While we are thinking of other ways to make transportation safer, why don’t we ban people from driving old cars too, because new ones are much safer, and make poor people walk or take the bus instead?

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Because it is safer for the child to be in a car seat and better for the airline to have every passenger fly in the safest way possible. People make choices all the time about the cost of doing one thing or the other, and some of those choices aren’t easy. No one is forcing people to make choices not to fly, just setting the laws to make it safe. If a family can’t afford a car seat or choose not to afford it, then the child can’t travel in a car. If the family can’t afford an airline ticket or chooses not to, then that child doesn’t get to fly.

My old neighbors used to fly with their under age two child as a lap child. All the time. Internationally. They could have afforded it, but chose not to buy a ticket for her. They liked her (and she was a really big child) on their laps. They liked to sit in one row (also had another child) but if the law was that she needed a ticket, they would have purchased one.

It doesn’t make sense to me that that parent has the right to a free ticket for the one year old but won’t have that same right when the child turns two to visit the same family.

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Two is the age set internationally for lap children, presumably because most children over that age would be too difficult to contain on a parent’s lap.
There are many ways to meaningfully improve child welfare, but this isn’t one of them.

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I agree. The risk of injury is just so minuscule. And if buying the extra ticket for the infant meant that the family decided to drive rather than fly, the rule would backfire. For anyone, the greatest risk of injury on a plane trip is during the drive to the airport.

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