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The incident in which two women trapped a crying child in an airplane toilet has sparked debate on the Chinese internet about how to handle children in public places. One of the two women said on social media that she tried to help by silencing the child, but she was quickly met with a strong reaction. The BBC quoted the airline as saying that the girl’s grandmother had allowed the two women to “teach her a lesson.”
The incident occurred on a Junyao aircraft flying from Guiyang to Shanghai. The child, who was travelling with her grandmother, began crying during the flight and the airline said in a statement that the grandmother agreed to allow the two women to approach her.
A video posted on Chinese social media by one of them showed another woman demanding that the one-year-old girl stop crying or she would not leave the bathroom. Shortly after she posted the video, many people criticized her for having no empathy and “bullying” the child, to which she responded by saying she would rather “take action than be a bystander.” “I just wanted to calm her down and for everyone to relax,” she wrote on Douyin, the Chinese equivalent of TikTok. She also explained that some passengers “moved to the back of the plane to avoid the noise,” while others had noise-isolating devices installed on their ears.
One Weibo user commented: “Children can’t control their emotions at the age of one or two. What’s wrong with crying? Didn’t you cry when you were a child? Another expressed concern about the psychological impact on the girl, saying: “We must think about how to make public places more accepting and accommodating of children.”
But others defended the two women, saying their actions were justified because the child’s grandmother had given her consent to approach her.
Debate has escalated over how to regulate China’s so-called “bear babies,” spoiled animals that make noises in public places, such as screaming or damaging property. The use of the word “bear” in this context suggests some in China believe children may behave inappropriately.
Opinions elsewhere in the world have been divided as some public trains have begun to set up separate carriages for children. South Korea, for example, has designated hundreds of child-free zones in restaurants, museums and theaters. But lawmakers have called on the government to scrap the policy and stressed the need to rebuild a more child-accepting society, especially as the country battles a falling birth rate.
Notably, international airlines including Turkish-Dutch Corendon Airlines and Singapore-based Scoot offer passengers the option of paying more to sit in child-free sections.
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