Crying Children, Parenting, Airplanes, and Sanity

It's all very, very simple.

Young children, especially mobile ones, have a tendency to become impatient on airplanes. Impatience leads to dissatisfaction, manifested in crying or temper tantrums.

A good parent will handle this situation with as much patience as possible, using proactive reasoning, soothing, and suitable punishment, if necessary.
A less-than-great parent will lose patience, act irritated, and tell the child how bad he is and how angry she is.

There are, of course, other people on the airplane as this is going on.

Either way, if the child doesn't stop, the inescapable noise coupled with the confinement will drive people to insanity. I have devised an equation modeling the situation.
s = lost sanity,
d= decibels of child's noisemaking,
D = decibels of adult's responding noisemaking,
r = length of the exchange,
p = proximity of the passenger (in number of seats),
k = leg room in square feet (or lack thereof),
and z = how loud the person next to you is snoring (decibels).

s = (pr[10d + 5D] + 7z)/k

This is for a reasonable parent. In the equation for a irritating parent, replace the addtion signs with multiplication signs. This changes the equation more than you'd think.

Then, of course, there is the sanity threshold. This has nothing to do with how clinically sane someone is, or how eccentric they are. Sanity in this case reflects how easily someone takes irritating things in stride, and how easily they lose their temper. Here is the approximate scale:

100- cabbage
90
80- friendly dogs
70
60
50
40- most cats
30
20- victims of repeated telemarketing
10- victims of repeated political telemarketing
0- crazy nun at a Catholic school

Let it be noted that even cabbage can only take so much of a child/parent pair throwing a tantrum in an airplane. Especially if you're sitting right behind them on a small airplane- like I was, earlier today.


Ylerecnis,
N