TSA Took My Toddler’s Juice

If you felt especially safe while flying on Monday, Oct. 10, it can only be because my daughter’s tiny juice boxes were confiscated that same day by an especially vigilant Transportation Security Administration agent at the Denver International Airport.

It made for a rough start to the return flight of our first nearly cross-country journey together. As anyone who has ever flown with a 3-year-old knows, such trips are a delicate crossed-fingers tightrope walk where so much happiness – not just your own child’s but that of an entire plane-full of adults flying with her - is riding on your with new books, portable DVD players, and yes, snacks and drinks. But the TSA doesn’t particularly care about such things when liquids in quantities slightly greater than 3 ounces are in the mix.

Apparently Lucy’s three, unopened 4.3 ounce boxes of orange-tangerine Juicy Juice were a grave threat to national security, despite the fact that I had packed them in my carry-on in a quart Ziploc bag, in accordance with to the TSA’s own instructions on its website. In fact, its website stated that the “3-1-1”/Ziploc bag rule – that translates to liquids in quantities of 3.4 ounces or less in one quart-sized Ziploc in one carry-on bag - doesn’t even apply to people traveling with “a baby or small child.” Wouldn’t you think that a 3-year-old qualifies as a small child? When I suggested this to the agent, she informed me that “small child” means “infant,” even though nowhere in their printed policies is that stated as emphatically and clearly.

Yet I suppose I can’t place all the blame on the overzealous, power-mad TSA agent. My first misstep was that I followed another agent’s advice earlier in the screening process to enter any security line, rather than making a beeline for the one designated for families. My second mistake was that I didn’t take my Juicy Juice Ziploc out of my backpack before the security check. I was apparently supposed to formally “declare” its existence and in not doing so, I forfeited my daughter’s right to in-air hydration and relief from ear popping during take-off. For that I sincerely apologize, even though no one batted an eye about the offending Juicy Juice when we flew out BWI days earlier.

The problem is that clear-thinking and absolute rule following goes out the window when you are traveling alone with a small child and her so-called “reasonable quantities” of juice. While we had spent a lovely long weekend with my brother and his family, Lucy was tired in the airport that morning, whacked out by the mountain time zone, having woken up at 4 a.m. local time for days in a row. So she was a bit of an overtired handful by the time we were heading home. I was doing my best to keep her tantruming to a minimum, which made it difficult to play the post-9/11 game of TSA to the letter. And while I’m grateful that the TSA no longer requires kids to take off their shoes like we grown-ups have to do and I was relieved that Lucy didn’t have to have any kind of creepy pat-down, the confiscated juice just felt like overkill in our quest to beat the terrorists to their next high-flying attack.