There's a lot of kids that aren't like that once they reach, say, toddler age. They know they can terrorize mom/dad as much as they like and they'll still be there, so they ruthlessly exploit that. They can be ruthlessly terrorizing next to their parents, but put them next to a stranger they'll be polite and relatively quiet because they intuitively know they are capable of anything.

i.e. when my child was young, a waiter could hand them a lemonade and they'd be ecstatic. If I handed them the same lemonade, they would start screaming at me the color of cup was wrong.

Agreed. The point of these things is that the company is betting on you doing the decent thing at your expense. I refuse to accommodate their failure.

I was in one of these situations once where we missed a scheduled flight because of an airline screwup, and they refused to accommodate us without a substantial payment - thousands of dollars. Frankly, I couldn’t afford it. This despite the fact I already paid for an assigned seat on the fubar flight.

The predictable outcome happened after they pulled away from the gate and the flight crew came to me and my response was “He’s 20 rows away, what do you expect me to do? Sounds like the options are to move us, or return to the gate.”

They figured it out and were great about it, but the whole situation was stressful to everyone and was completely unnecessary. Flight crews are busy and it’s just senseless toil.

Then the airlines should offer those more flexible people the option to buy a cheaper ticket that doesn’t include seat assignment. Just brainstorming here, they might call those tickets “Basic” or something.

Then, people with that flexibility could offer that flexibility to the airline in exchange for a cheaper ticket that meets their needs and people who don’t have the same level of flexibility could buy tickets that reflect their needs.

I say this as a parent who pays for assigned seats because we choose to buy tickets that reflect our actual level of flexibility.

Feel like grandma is more capable of traveling to see the kids with the newborn than the other way around

You would think that this is an odd question. It's such an odd question if grant a degree of anonymity. I've seen a similar type of question, as it relates to affordances for parents in the workplace, like no on-call for a time when a newborn is on the scene. I don't know if this is just happening because people are feeling unfairly impacted when folks on teams become parents, but I'm always bracing for these comments now.

He said had to, as in necessities. No one has to go on vacations, much less fly for them

Then pay the extra money to choose your seat like most adults do. Delta said in an earnings call for instance that less than 5% choose basic economy where you can’t choose your seat.

Hmmm didn't realize families had to go on vacation, and even more so they had to do it by flying

I didn't do these things for economic reasons growing up, and I'm perfectly fine today

A small correction, but there are plenty of reasons someone might require flying. The travel might be required and also be on a tight schedule or terrain might be impractical to traverse by other methods. As an example: a friend of mine had to fly across the continental US for spinal surgery because traveling is stressful on the body and they couldn't be e.g. on a train for multiple days. People move across oceans all the time and might not have the luxury of being able to make a long trip by boat.