There’s a scene in the TV drama The Cry that will ring painfully true with anyone who’s travelled with a baby on a plane.

Jenna Coleman’s character is trying to soothe her fractious baby on a long-haul flight (her husband is helpfully asleep most of the time), while passengers all around are getting increasingly annoyed.

It’s not her fault that her baby is crying, and yet she - as the mother - is facing the blame and low-level judgement of everyone else on the plane.

While most traumatic plane journeys like this will never end catastrophically (as in The Cry), they are still a real battleground for parents to contend with. And invariably, mums take on the brunt of that struggle.

It’s a horrible situation that one mum captured with raw emotion recently, in the form of a viral letter posted to Facebook.

American Stephanie Hollifield, who runs the parenting blog Momstrosity, addressed her missive to the man who reacted with “dramatic huffs and puffs” as she sat down in the seats behind him with her two-year-old daughter, Haley, on a recent flight.

This was Hollifield’s first flight alone with her child, she explains, so she was already nervous. When the man started muttering annoyances at Hayley crying, “I almost started crying myself,” says Hollifield. “I was feeling shame and guilt for not being able to control my own child.”

Plane shaming: this viral letter says everything about mums who travel with babies