I have a friend who calmly pinches the crap out of her son's arm on the back just above the elbow when he is acting up in public. She keeps a smile on her face and lets him know there is more waiting for him at home if he doesn't behave and nobody sees what is going on. HEr son usually straightens right up.
We fly Southwest alot so we get free tickets and those free drink coupons. We always take books of those with us, in case our 20 month-old decides to be screechy. Once, we had some young guys sit behind us and they were swearing and vulgar and just sleazy-nasty. They were not loud. We had our 8year-old with us at the time. I asked them to please realize there was a kid in front of them who can hear that language, and I gave them each a book of drink coupons. They apologized and they were fantastic and well-behaved the rest of the flight. I've given out those books when I get the looks from people that I can see are irritated with our noise. It doesn't happen often. Usually, when I apologize for the noise, the people who were giving out dirty looks tend to change their demeanor and say, well, we know you can't help it, etc. Now, it's only happened a couple times and nothing that lasted more than 5 minutes (although it seems like forever when the child is screaming). I am wondering, about this little girl. It must not have been the screaming so much as the actual behavior that got the flight attendant's attention. We've never had that problem. We are much bigger than all our children and they can scream all they want, they are going in the seat. It's hard as a parent to know the screeches are annoying other passengers. That's why we try to line up interventions ahead of time - a whole bag of tricks to offset any loudness. We hardly ever get to use them, thankfully. We fly just about every month, round trip, Austin to Chicago and back. We've seen those kids that are wild. My heart goes out to the parents and to the rest of us having to deal with it. It's very stressful for everyone.