A six year old girl was recently told that she couldn’t take her teddy bear with her on an easyJet flight from Glasgow, UK to Stansted Airport, London because it was wrapped in a carrier bag, and therefore considered “excess baggage”. Her infuriated mother declined to pay an extra fee to have the bear placed in the hold, instead mailing it to their home in Cambridgeshire. The airline has since offered to pay for the mailing cost and apologized, but of course the damage has already been done.
I made the mistake once of telling my son that it was silly for him to get upset when he wasn’t allowed to bring one of his toys into the bath with him because it was a plush animal, and would have been ruined by the immersion into water. I said “It’s just a toy.”
It didn’t matter that I was doing the right thing by preserving his toy by keeping it out of the tub; by telling him that it was “just a toy”, I invalidated his strong feelings for it, which was never my intention.
As parents, we need to be aware of a lot of things at the same time. Because our children aren’t sophisticated enough in the ways of the world to be able to watch out for themselves in a great many situations, we need to do it for them, and teach them along the way how to learn to do it themselves. But many times we neglect to account for the developing emotional lives of our children. What might seem like a tiny matter to us might be a huge deal for them. It really doesn’t matter if it can be rationally explained, or logically reasoned; we’re talking about feelings, and these aren’t always sensible.
It seems apparent that if the mother in this news story had pressed the point and spoken with a manager, she might have been able to keep the bear with her daughter; I say this because of the airline’s apology. But it should never have occurred in the first place. Policy may be the guildeline for behavior in many companies, but it should always bow to common sense.
