Crying is, by its very nature and purpose, difficult to tolerate and ignore. Even for loving parents, taking a baby on a flight can be incredibly tiring and trying. What's wrong with offering passengers the chance to be a few rows away from the noise?
What? Really? This is the main conclusion you draw from this article?
Society isn't intolerant of children, society sees that there is a market for increased comfort in airlines, and that "peace and quiet" is an integral part of comfort.
That's the real solution, charge more for small children and use the extra charge to reduce prices of the seats nearby. It should be prohibitively expensive to bring a crying child on the plane.
BS, Parents have to fly sometimes and upping the cost will do nothing aside from harming parents by making them pay more. It won't deter people from flying at all. Believe me as a Parent the airlines make it difficult enough to fly, that very few parents do it without a pretty compelling reason.
Even if it did reduce the number of children on board, that's a worse solution than the problem currently is. Children learn by doing, including manners on planes. Remove a generation of children from anything and you'll have a generation that has no idea how to behave during that activity.
I guess I should have wrote infants that are unable to stop crying. I'm fine with children if they can manage to not kick the seats. Upping the cost enough would prevent parents of infants from flying and it would be wonderful.