ARLINGTON, Virginia — My wife was surprised to learn that I was headed to the airport on Monday. The next day was our daughter’s birthday, and I had been gone most of the past three weeks. I had not mentioned any travel plans to her, and she was counting on me to cook dinner. Alarmed may be the word.
But I told her I wasn’t flying anywhere. I was headed to Ronald Reagan National Airport to cover an event hosted by the Department of Transportation, titled “Make Travel Family-Friendly Again.”
I didn’t wake up that morning intending to go cover anything, but I had to. For one thing, with artificial intelligence supposedly improving rapidly and ready to take our jobs, I resolved to make myself less AI-replaceable (could we shorten that “replAIceable”?) in part by covering more things in person.
Also, I simply had to cover the event. After all, I wrote a book last year, titled Family Unfriendly, about how so much of our culture needs to be made more family-friendly, and here was the transportation secretary, who has eight or nine children, talking about exactly that.
But I noted that one email about the event, and about this family-friendly travel campaign, said the “campaign will focus on incentivizing more family-friendly resources in airports and expanding access to healthier food options on the go.”
Hmm. Those seem like two different things — both good things, but different things. Keeping your children from melting down and not getting fat and lazy are not the same undertaking.
As soon as I got to the airport, I ran into a family from Seattle. Their names were Shane and Jeatt, the latter pronounced “Jet.” This was regrettable, because I feared my readers would have trouble believing that the mother I interviewed about flying with children had the name “Jet.”
While their three-year-old (I am guessing here) wriggled on the floor and on top of one of the large suitcases, Shane and Jeatt told me that they had no trouble flying with their three children all the time. They said they believe air travel in the United States is already perfectly family-friendly. Another sad trombone played in my mind. This undermined the premise of both my book and this DOT event.
(At this point, Shane handed me his family’s leftover Metro SmarTrip cards, each with about $6 left. For journalistic ethics purposes, I feel I need to report here that I accepted these gifts.)
During the interview, I realized something: While I consider myself somewhat of an expert on raising children (my wife and I have six of them), and I have numerous ideas and systems when it comes to traveling with children, I actually have zero insights into flying with children.
My wife and I just don’t do it. We are not rich enough to afford eight plane tickets. Instead, we vacation by minivan or SUV.
Literally, the first time I flew with more than one child at a time was two weeks ago, and it was my 19-year-old and my 17-year-old. The only logistical problem on that trip was that my daughter, returning to college, threw a party for herself the night before and had to pack at 4 a.m. before a 6:05 a.m. flight. Also, I had mild acid reflux, probably from drinking hazy IPAs the night before (not at my daughter’s party, FWIW).
On Monday, when I arrived at the spot for the DOT airport event, I noticed a big pull-up bar. It was about 9 feet off the ground. I reviewed the email from DOT and became even more confused. Here were the problems the department hoped to address in its “family-friendly campaign”:
“From [1] needing more dedicated spaces for young children and [2] exercise equipment, to [3] finding places for mothers to nurse their children, to [4] staying fit on the go, or [5] struggling to find more healthy food options …”
Most of those five problems have nothing to do with children. If I had flown with my brood when they were young, I would not have been upset about the lack of salads or gone in search of a lat pulldown machine. I would have wanted a bar overlooking a massive play area for children, ranging from ages 2 to 12, where I could eat wings and drink IPAs. That bar would also feature a menu item currently lacking in airports: all-you-can-eat chicken nuggets.
Picture that: I’m downing Dogfish 60-Minute because the Southwest pilot is doing the driving, Charlie’s wrestling Brendan on a floor mat, Sean’s grabbing a handful of nuggets, Meg and Eve are climbing a jungle gym, and Lucy’s sneaking a sip of her mother’s pinot. That’s family-friendly travel.
When I consider other families traveling by air, my main concern is the attitudes of other Americans. Some adults seem to think that children don’t belong on airplanes.
Babies cry. If you wanted your children to sit next to you, they say, you should have ordered your tickets 10 months ago. Toddlers drool and occasionally yell while they have headphones in as their parents try to pacify them with the digital babysitter.
Somehow, we have reached a point as a culture where parents are expected to feel bad about bringing their children into public places. Again and again, stories appear in the news of parents bringing goodie bags on board for those who need to sit near their babies: earplugs, drink coupons, and so on.
And then there are the stories of parents having to move heaven and earth to sit next to their children on a plane.
That’s total crap.
I love hanging out with my children, but I don’t need to sit next to them. I certainly don’t need to haggle with the person sitting next to me to give up their seat for my children.
Had I flown with my children, I would have brought a different sort of baggie and handed it to the person seated next to my children. “Here are some wet wipes and a little trash bag, because I have no idea what’s gonna come out of my boys. And here are some snacks: If you pace them out right, Sean won’t talk at all for the whole flight.”
As we got closer to the start of the airport event, I started to gather clues that this was not for me. I spotted a woman with an eight-month-old and introduced myself, figuring she was a DOT staffer. She was very well put together, with perfect hair, but I figured this was just normal in the Trump administration. Later, I learned that she is a “content creator.” That is, she is an influencer. Specifically, now she would qualify as a “momfluencer.”
A “momfluencer” who has only one child and who has been a mother for only a few months was one of the speakers at this event. Another speaker was a fitness influencer with an Italian name.
Also, there was Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
When Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy took the stage, the influencers stood to his left, along with the CEO of Farmer’s Fridge, which sells vending-machine salads. To Duffy’s right stood RFK Jr.
RFK Jr., I realized, was the reason this event involved a pull-up bar and a vending machine full of salads. He stood in shirt and tie, looking jacked and awkwardly stiff. If you didn’t know he was a Kennedy and didn’t know he was a Cabinet official, you would have thought, by his stance, that RFK Jr. was Duffy’s bodyguard, whose only weapons were his hands.
Most people who heard about this airport event afterward learned from the posts of Aaron Rupar, a liberal social media user whose job is to post out-of-context quotes to make Republicans look bad.
But this event made Rupar’s job easy. It was not very hard to make a 71-year-old RFK Jr. sound weird when he began his remarks with an ode to “the infant formula in a mother’s breast.”
Much of what RFK Jr. and Duffy said was good and important. Crucially, Duffy was not laying out a set of mandates or new funding for airports. He was announcing rule clarifications that would allow airports to use already-existing federal funds for family-friendly infrastructure, such as better play places or dedicated family TSA lines.
Children need to burn as much energy as possible before getting on a flight, as Jeatt and Shane commented, and as every parent knows. If airports use millions of federal dollars to build awesome, sprawling, bar-adjacent playgrounds, that really would be great for families.
WE’RE GETTING FEWER BIRTHS, NOT JUST LATER BIRTHS
Yet somehow this discussion at the airport soon devolved into a pull-up contest between RFK Jr., Duffy, the fitness influencer, and one of Duffy’s many daughters.
One reporter asked Duffy if he thought it was a good idea for people to get really sweaty before getting packed into a plane for hours. Duffy brushed that idea off while RFK Jr. panted heavily with sweat glistening on his brow. As my wife texted me telling me to come home and cook the chicken, the CEO of Farmer’s Fridge started offering us all free food. For journalistic ethics reasons, I declined the free vending machine salad, but I thought, man, I wish my children could have been here to see this odd spectacle. My boys could have done pull-ups, and maybe I could have forced them all to eat the salad.
