> It doesn’t make sense to tax every other passenger for it.

I'd rather pay a monetary tax on my ticket to keep families organized together instead of the discomfort tax of sharing a row with parent+child that has been unexpectedly split up from their partner and is now trying to manage the child's behavior for the duration of the flight without the benefit of teamwork.

They don’t guarantee both parents are with the kid. They only guarantee that at least one parent is next to each (very young) child.

This presumably would mean you’d be feeding a random kid a bottle on long flights. God knows how they’d accommodate breastfeeding.

Agreed. Flying with my own kids, I'm constantly helping them. They struggle with headphones, opening food, fastening seat belts, being reminded to use the bathroom. Worse: they spill food, have potty training accidents, kick seats, yell, cry, and get scared. It gets easier as they get older, thankfully.

With an infant, having two caregivers within reach is huge. When flying with infant in arms there's nowhere to put the kid down, you don't have a free hand. An extra set of hands to wipe up spit-up, help adjust clothing for breastfeeding, collect the diaper bag, etc is a huge help.

The idea that parents need to pay more to help their children is cruel. I would expect people seated next to a child to end up swapping, to help the parent and to escape the noisy child. But that slows down boarding as people shuffle seats and adds anxiety that we're perfectly able to resolve.