According to an article in Detroit free Press, crying babies are rate top irritants in airplanes. According to polls conducted by Hilton Honors Survey, most people prefer silence over crying and, would rather drive for long distances in silence than fly sitting next to a crying baby. The polls also indicate that fifty four percent would prefer a section devoted to families in airlines for families with babies. It is this irritation brought by crying babies that led Malaysia Airlines to ban infants in their first class in some of its Boeings.
Babies communicate through crying, and sometime are difficult to quite down. The cry is perceived differently by different people depending on their past experiences. After one gets their own children, they become more tolerant to babies cry and empathetic towards the mothers according to Creager.
According to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a baby’s cry either makes the listener feel sorry for the baby and mother or become angry at them. When a baby cry in an airplane, passengers respond differently; some stares at the mother, some ruffle their news paper, while others raise the volume of their headphones and turn up their over head fans. But those who have had a past experience are mostly not disturbed rather; they feel empathetic to the mother. The mothers try to soothe their frantic babies often feeling embarrassed. Creager wonders whether ones’ past experiences affect how a person perceives a baby’s cry. She suggests that the next poll, on crying babies, should try establishing this.