Security is not child’s play

IT has become as inevitable as death and taxes -- the airport security line pat-down. It’s society’s great equalizer. No one is exempt, not movie stars, not politicians, not the aged or infirm and certainly not children.

My daughter was inspected with a wand when she was 20 months old. She was wearing overalls with metal hooks. She wasn’t allowed to pass until we stripped her down to her diaper and she was inspected again with the wand. I have watched a mother wrestle a small stuffed lamb out of her screaming son’s hands so the lamb could be X-rayed, and my son has had his crayon-stuffed backpack searched at least five times. It’s funny, sort of, until it’s not.

In a letter to The Times, Arlene Sullivan of Allendale, N.J., recounted a recent encounter with LAX security. When her 2-year-old grandson was asked to relinquish his pillow, he became upset. When he walked through the gates, the alarms went off and he became more upset.

So his grandmother held him while Transportation Security Administration staff examined them with a wand and patted them down. During the process, the child became hysterical. According to Sullivan, this made the TSA staff members hostile, which exacerbated the hysteria. When Sullivan finally located a supervisor, she was told the incident was her fault because she had allowed the child to wear “light-up shoes,” which caused the alarm to go off.

According to TSA spokesman Nico Melendez, if there had been any problem with the shoes, they should have been X-rayed separately. “I don’t think it’s any secret that we are screening shoes,” he said.

He said TSA personnel “go through hours of training on how to deal with everything from elderly travelers to children -- I can’t imagine no assistance was offered.”

Melendez recommends that those traveling with small children consult www.tsa.gov for tips on procedure and packing.

“We are there for one reason,” he said. “To ensure everyone’s safety and assist travelers.”

Even allowing for grandmotherly hyperbole, I think a cardinal rule among airport staff should be: Don’t make the children cry. Lord knows they do enough crying on their own. I suppose there are people evil enough to use children to transport bombs, so exempting kids from the whole search thing is not an option. It would be nice to have a “with-kids” security line, but that’s just dreaming.

So it is up to parents to prepare for the security line. Here are a few things I’ve learned.

* Give yourself enough time and warn your kids about the possibility of the lines in advance. We arrive 2 1/2 hours before international flights, almost two hours before domestic.

* Warn children that they will have to put down all security blankets/dolls/lambs and pillows. Practice at home.

* Don’t let kids wear any metal. Not overalls, not necklaces, not watches or bracelets -- not even hair clips.

* Pack their jackets and roller shoes in check-in luggage. Have them wear slip-on shoes if possible, which will simplify things if they need to remove them at the security gate.

* Tell kids not to touch the sides of the security gate. It will make the alarm go off.

* Don’t pack toy guns, not even squirt guns or wooden guns. This is just asking for trouble. Agents searched my son’s bag for a tiny toy cannon he had bought in Gettysburg and then examined it for five minutes to make sure the thing didn’t fire. They were nice about it, but the people behind us in line were not.

* Don’t let the attitudes of the people behind you in line make you yell at your kids. Flying has become so frustrating that tempers are worn thin long before boarding time. If someone seems in danger of missing their flight, let them cut. But there is no reason to snatch things from your children or tell them to hurry because the people behind you are irritated. They would be irritated anyway. They are in an airport.