[jimworcs]

There is no "distant" part of the aircraft that the parent and child can be dispatched to...and I think it is ludicrous to suggest that unruly children should be imposed on people based on how much they should pay. The FA's should have warned the parents to control their children...and perhaps the passengers themselves could have asked the parents to control their unruly offspring. The problem here was entirely with the parents.

Once in the air, the airline only has two possible sanctions for truly unruly passengers. First, they can threaten to land, eject the unruly passengers from the aircraft and the costs of the diversion be charged to them. The second is to threaten to cancel their return ticket (if they have one) or ban them from future flights. Faced with real sanctions, the parents may have made more of an effort to take action.

The suggestion that a solution is to displace the unruly children to bother passengers who had paid less is ridiculous and no solution at all.

Put the blame where is belongs, The Parents. However, Continental's FA's should have done more.

Having said all of that.. there remains one other possibility. That is the children were not all that unruly. This was three separate families and all three were bad parents with unruly children? Perhaps the reason the FA's took no action was because the problem was not the children..but rather the snobbish intolerance of the OP?