Why should child-free plane passengers be expected to jump to move for families?

Kids on planes. A reality, a pressure-cooker ‒ and sometimes a delight. As a child-free person and frequent flyer, I can’t count the number of times my heart has sunk at the sight of a toddler climbing into the seat beside or in front of me, only to find myself cooing through an impromptu game of peek-a-boo or smiling at their cute aviation questions hours later.

Then there are the other times ‒ when, four hours into a 12-hour night flight to Bangkok, the six-year-old four rows in front is playing on a gaming device. At full volume. With no headphones. Often cabin crew are reluctant to intervene at moments like this, unless it’s a full in-aisle meltdown ‒ when I asked in this case, a Thai Airways flight attendant merely grimaced and said: “It’s a child.”

There was the three-year-old who didn’t seem at all pleased that his parents had booked him a plum business class seat home from Rome. He screamed his lungs out from the Alps to the Channel as I wondered why the manufacturer of my noise-cancelling headphones hadn’t tot-tested them. That said, I’m no monster ‒ I do understand that flying with kids is tricky, families need holidays as much as the rest of us, and that no parent wants their kid to make a scene.

What can be worse than the little darlings themselves are the parents. Model and Made in Chelsea WAG Vogue Williams made the headlines recently when she recounted the story of a man (presumably a solo traveller) who wasn’t keen to swap seats so she could sit with her husband and child on a flight from Gibraltar to London. In telling the tale, she wasn’t mildly annoyed, but outright enraged. She called the offending passenger “a piece of s**t” and “an absolute t**t” as she fumed over the interaction (which saw the man in question eventually agree to move seats).

Things I can understand about this story: being worried about not sitting next to your child, feeling flustered with more than one child on a flight, feeling frustrated with yourself for not paying attention to your seat booking. (Williams said on the podcast episode with the story that it was “her mistake” for booking herself on to a different row than her husband.)

What I can’t understand is her astonishment and her fury that this poor bloke ‒ who may have booked his particular seat for a reason, may be a nervous flyer, or may be going through something less visible than your Instagram Family Drama ‒ did not jump to immediately offer his seat the…