After a woman found drawings all over her tray table on a United Airlines flight, you have to wonder what happened to both the parents and the cleaning crew.
Drawings On Tray Table Expose Bad Parenting, Bad Cleaning
A woman took to Twitter to complain about her bad United Airlines flight to St. Maarten and while her focus was on flight attendants, she also revealed her tray table had drawings all over it that had not been cleaned.
This @united flight was giving @SpiritAirlines Flight attendants were rude, a fight broke out, and surely no one bothered to clean my tray. Only Delta and JetBlue to St. Martin ever again! #unitedairlines #airlinenightmares pic.twitter.com/i1cD3rAFj1
— Anita Dolce Vita (@DolceFemmeAnita) December 21, 2023
Earlier this year I wrote about a mother who allowed her child to scribble with a marker all over the seat, tray table, wall, and window of her aircraft seat. She justified it by saying that it was using a washable marker:
Bratty Kid Draws All Over Airplane With Her Marker. This Is Not Okay.
“These are a great tool to pull out when the iPad has run its course. I prefer to let my toddler use these when I want him to go to sleep, because the iPad stimulates him and I find it’s harder to get him to sleep. And we all know a sleeping toddler on a long flight is a MAJOR WIN.”
Yeah…no.
It’s not that I cannot empathize somewhat with the situation. If you walked into my daughter’s room just a few months ago you would have seen scribbling all over the floors, desk, chair, dresser, wall, window, bed, books, and toys. She even managed to tag the ceiling (don’t ask me how…).
Rather than affirm her artistic creation, we disciplined her. And made her, even at the age of two years old, scrub it up.
Now she’s three and guess what? She doesn’t do it any longer. She knows that markers and crayons and colored pencils are only for paper.
The challenge with parenting is the careful balance required in utilizing consistent discipline while not breaking the spirit of the child. Both are manifestations of love and both work with each other to create a person that respects authority and recognizes the world does not revolve around them. This is true even at an early age.
But returning to the United flight, it almost seems more egregious because based on the detail of the drawings it appears this was done by an older child. That’s a major parenting failure.
But it is also a failure of the cleaning crew. Far too often I open my tray table and find food or other grime caked on it, as I recently did on another United flight:
Are cabin cleaners simply not doing their job or does United not give them enough to clean trays between flights? A quick inspection and wipe down of each tray table seems pretty fundamental to me in cleaning cabin between flights…
CONCLUSION
Another reminder and another plea: please do not let your children draw on airplane equipment like tray tables. If they do, YOU should clean it up instead of leaving it for others to do. And as for United, it is time the carrier did a better job in cleaning tray tables between flights.
> Read More: Bratty Kid Draws All Over Airplane With Her Marker. This Is Not Okay.
image: @DolceFemmeAnita / X // Hat Tip: View From The Wing
In the good old days, the brat’s bottom would have been worn out had he/she pulled a stunt like that.
Parents these days care more about being their kids’ friend and not doing their job of being a parent and raising them
Yup, exactly.
Bad parenting one generation back.
Yeah! And those were great times, being able to beat your child till they black out, smack your wife too. People are too weak now! #maga
There goes the deep clean after every flight during covid times… All they probably did on that flight was the cross the seat belts so it appears cleaned, LOL.
By the way, there was no such thing as deep clean during Covid. I have never seen it.
No chance for a “deep clean” with the turnaround time on many flights. If you think your tray table is clean you are sadly mistaken.
That said, no one should be eating directly off a tray table.
And yes, the parent is anything but.
The kid’s parents are idiots. There is no other explanation.
Who gets in a fight on a flight to SXM? Did one passenger steal the other’s sunset dinner reservation in St Barths?
I like sitting at the back but unfortunately, this is where all the kids are, good or bad. I try to ignore them even if they’re banging on the back of my seat, on purpose or not. … It’s also the airline’s / flight attendant’s fault if they allow this to happen, to damage their property.