> Then pay the extra money to choose your seat like most adults do.

It's an additional expense which isn't a luxury for parents. You can't sit far from an infant for 6+ hours because they need close attention. Also, sometimes there aren't adjacent seats for you to choose. Nevertheless, gate agents are usually able to somehow make things work. I'm not sure how they do this on a packed flight though. I didn't notice anyone being called over the PA after a gate agent moved all three of our seats to a different row on our last packed flight.

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raw_anon_1111 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Flying is a luxury. It’s one thing to pay taxes to fund the school system, pre-K, health care, even state college. I’m all for that. But if you want to fly as a parent either suck it up and pay or don’t fly. There are parents who take long road trips because they can’t afford to fly.

But I paid for my seat and if I did pay to sit next to my wife (which isn’t really a big deal for either of us), I would be really pissed if my seat was changed because a parent was too cheap to pay to have an assigned seat.

My wife and I have chosen a different flight because the seats we wanted wasn’t available.

Of course all of these opinions of mine go out of the window if it truly is an emergency. But even then, at least with Delta, they only allocate a certain number of seats as “basic economy” and once those are sold out - like they might be on a last minute flight - you have to pay a fare where you choose your seat.

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rimunroe 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> Flying is a luxury.

You appear to have since edited your comment, but the version I replied to referred to being able to choose a seat as the luxury, not flying itself. As I've said elsewhere, flying is either a straight up necessity in some cases and a practical one in others. As I've also said in other places, people without kids can fly without need of choosing their seats.

> But I paid for my seat and if I did pay to sit next to my wife (which isn’t really a big deal for either of us), I would be really pissed if my seat was changed because a parent was too cheap to pay to have an assigned seat.

You can debate on whether or not flying is a necessity, but if we're flying then it's a luxury for you to sit next to your wife but it's a necessity for me to sit next to my infant.

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raw_anon_1111 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s a distinction without a difference. Just like flying is a luxury. I paid to sit next to my wife. You can pay to sit next to your infant. Don’t inconvenience me because you want to save a couple of hundred dollars.

You have to pay for all sorts of “necessities” because you have kids - just add that to the list.

	▲	rimunroe 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> It’s a distinction without a difference. That difference matters quite a bit if you're specifically arguing about how people who are going to fly get to experience said flight. [Edit] If you don't believe that parents have as much reason to fly as anyone else I don't think there's much point to further discussion. However if you do believe it then whether or not assigned seating specifically counts as a luxury matters quite a bit. > You have to pay for all sorts of “necessities” because you have kids - just add that to the list. Why should we accept increasing the relative cost of having kids? That's a very good way to make having kids prohibitively expensive and part of how we've gotten to the point we're at. I'm in my late 30s and most of my friends chose not to have kids. For quite a few of those friends, they decided not to have them specifically because of how expensive it's become. You might think that's acceptable or even good, but birthrates are declining and people don't seem interested in allowing immigrants to come in and fill the void so I'm not sure what the endgame here is.
	▲	2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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