Is it safe to fly with your baby in your lap?
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- While common, experts say allowing children under two to fly in laps is not the safest option.
- The FAA recommends that all passengers, including babies, fly in their own seat, with a car seat if needed.
- Turbulence is the number one cause of injury for lap infants.
Before almost every flight I’ve taken recently, I’ve heard an announcement at the gate directed at parents with young children. It always says something like: if you have not purchased a seat for your child under 2, please come to the podium so we can add them to your reservation.
Airlines typically allow parents with children under the age of 2 to skip the expense of buying their babies a seat and instead opt to travel with them in their laps for the duration of the flight.
Experts say this practice is common but may not be the safest option for parents or their kids. Recent high-profile accidents have also led travelers, and especially parents traveling with their kids, to wonder about the best practices for safety while flying.
If you’re planning a trip with a young fellow traveler, here are some things to consider.
Is an in-lap child safe?
Sort of. It’s not so straightforward.
“It is safe if everything goes well,” Ben Hoffman, past president of the American Academy of Pediatrics and a nationally recognized expert on child passenger safety, told me.
Flying, after all, remains the safest way to travel by far.
But if your flight encounters turbulence (or worse) a baby-in-arms will likely not be in the most secure position.
“The biggest risk is not what everybody worries about, which is a crash. The biggest concern is turbulence,” Hoffman said.
According to the Federal Aviation Administration, turbulence is the number one cause of injury while flying for in-lap children.
Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, told me that it’s becoming more urgent to reconsider the in-lap infant policy for airlines as turbulence becomes more frequent and severe due to climate change.
In extreme turbulence or other inflight emergencies, “there’s no possible way that even the most loving arms could hold that baby,” she said.
As a flight attendant, Nelson finds it especially frustrating to tell parents it’s OK to hold their babies during a flight, when she knows it is not the safest way for those passengers to travel.
“We have all of the safety regulations that we are supposed to be enforcing on the plane,” she said. “It is highly frustrating to me to not be able to tell the parent that they are taking a risk with that child in their lap.”
What are safer alternatives?
Even the FAA recommends that all passengers, including babies, fly in their own seat. For most babies, the safest option is to secure their car seat to the window seat in a plane.
Experts advise against strapping a car seat to the aisle seat, because babies could be injured during food and drink services if a hot item spills.
Most car seats are certified by the FAA as plane safe.
“The best thing a parent of a child under 2 can do is purchase a seat for their child and use their car seat,” Hoffman said. “Especially for younger kids, the benefit is two-fold. The car seat will keep the child attached to the airplane seat so there’s not the risk to them flying around in turbulence, and it also distributes the forces over a wider surface area.”
Nelson said if you want your child to be able to travel in their car seat, it’s important to actually purchase them a seat on the plane. While many airline policies technically allow parents to secure car seats in unoccupied seats aboard, most flights are very full these days, so there may not be a seat available to do so.
She also said it’s just a good thing to do for practical reasons.
“If you have that seat for your child, you’re going to have more space to work with, with all of the tons of things you need to travel with that child,” Nelson said. “It’s a very strong safety argument that we want to have the public to understand and make sure they have the good information to make good decisions for their family, but it’s also the practical reality that you are going to have a better experience flying if you get that seat.”
Still, Hoffman acknowledged, it’s not practical for all families to purchase an extra seat for their baby when they travel.
“I don’t think we need to justify why a car seat would be better, I think the physics does that,” he said. “The problem is a seat for a six-month old on a plane costs exactly the same as the seat for the parent, and that’s impractical for a lot of families and impossible for many.”
Story continues below.
Other advice for parents traveling with young children
If you’re traveling with a young child, it’s a good idea to make sure they have snacks and distractions, and that you keep them as close to their regular routine as possible. (Easier said than done, of course.)
If your car seat isn’t FAA certified, you can also get an approved seat strap harness, so long as your child is at least 40 inches tall and weighs between 22 and 44 pounds.
And while Hoffman said that there are safety concerns – “the lap child is the best bad idea we’ve got. It really does put children at increased risk compared to adults” – he added that parents shouldn’t feel overly guilty if it’s the only viable option for their travels.
“Do the best you can with what you’ve got,” he said.
Zach Wichter is a travel reporter and writes the Cruising Altitude column for USA TODAY. He is based in New York and you can reach him at [email protected].
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