A mum-of-three was having the flight from hell. Then a fellow mum stepped in.

Flying with a young child can be tricky. Flying with three of them… well, you’re a brave person.

For one mum taking a flight out of Seattle early on Sunday morning, things went to pieces very quickly. The mum had a baby with her, and a toddler, and an older child. There was a delay with take-off, and the fully packed plane sat on the tarmac as the crew tried to sort out a weight issue. Then the baby started crying.

Kesha Bernard was also on the plane. She’s a mum of a three-year-old and a four-year-old, and she was on a rare holiday, away from her kids. She could hear the baby crying, but tuned it out.

“Everyone around me starts huffing and puffing and mumbling,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “Then I hear two kids crying (holy s***, right?). This lady has her toddler having a full-blown meltdown over her seatbelt being on.”

Bernard says she ignored the meltdown, but couldn’t ignore what happened next.

“I hear a woman complaining to this mother (that’s alone with two crying kids) that her child needs to stop kicking her seat. THEN I hear the mother say, ‘She’s three – I can’t believe you just did that!’

“Apparently the lady reached behind her and grabbed the child’s leg (aka, ‘Oh hell no…’).”

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Bernard says the flight attendant just stood there, listening. The older men around her started making remarks about “discipline”. No one did anything to help the mum.

“I sat here for 15 minutes waiting on someone closer to this woman to offer her help... because I’m surrounded by caring adults, right? (Wrong.) I turn around to see people mumbling and staring at this mother.

“One grown-ass woman was holding her hands on her ears and making the ugliest faces at this mother. Lady, are you freaking KIDDING ME?”

Bernard got out of her seat, went a few rows back and asked the mum if she needed help.

“She immediately handed me her baby. This lady was like HOLY HELL YESSSSSSSS! So ya know I take her baby and then I have to go sit down for take-off.

“The crying stopped. It’s a miracle. So I’m sitting here holding this precious baby that so happens to fall asleep (swooooon).”

Bernard took a photo of the sleeping baby’s legs on top of her and posted it on Facebook, along with the story of what had happened.

She added a plea for people to be “nice and considerate”.

“If someone needs help, for God's sake, HELP THEM. Complaining and mumbling doesn’t do a damn thing except make the person that needs help feel worse. (Words hurt.)

“To the lady holding her ears… GROW UP.

“How we can ignore a human in distress is beyond me.”

Since Sunday, Bernard has had more than 180,000 people like her post and more than 90,000 share it.

She tells Mamamia the response she’s had so far has been all positive – no one complaining about parents not keeping their kids under control.

Bernard believes that what she did is just what “anyone with a kind heart” would do.

“I don’t see myself as being ‘a hero’ or ‘amazing’,” she adds. “I’m just a real person who understands the struggles of motherhood.

“I believe that if we would all help each other, the world would be a much happier and stress-free place.”

What do you do when you hear kids crying on a plane?