Pop quiz: What’s worse than taking your baby on an airplane? How about getting your kids through the TSA line? That’s what has upset the father of a 10-year-old girl who was patted down by airport security recently.
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A video shot by California dad Kevin Payne of his daughter getting frisked by security at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport has gone viral, along with his complaints that agents were “invasive” and took two minutes to pat down his tween daughter:
According to NBC News, the 10-year-old was flagged because she’d left a Capri Sun in her carry-on, and as everyone who has had to throw out a perfectly good bottle of water at the TSA line knows, that’s a no-no in the post 9/11 world. Of course, she’s 10. It happens. We all know this.
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Then again, if agents hadn’t flagged her for it, and word got out, you can only imagine the hullabaloo that would ensue over how “lax” they were. So they decided to do the pat down on the kid, and her angry dad shot video of the whole thing. Payne claims the agents could have (his words here), “done a better scrutiny of what they were looking for prior to putting their hands all over my 10-year-old daughter.” It’s hard to tell just how “uncomfortable” this little girl is or whether agents did indeed cross the line.
What the video does bring to light is just how important it is to prep our kids for what can happen, not just in airports, but in many public places. Take your kid to a hockey game, a theater, even the local courthouse, and it’s very likely they will encounter security measures. That may include being frisked.
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Kids need to be prepared beforehand so they aren’t afraid, so they know what to do (open their bags, unzip their coats, cooperate with agents…), but also so they know why it is that all of this is being done. We live in a world where there are mass shootings on the regular, where airplanes have been hijacked and used to blow up buildings (with people inside), where kids need to be ready … for anything.
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