A man has been criticised for refusing to swap plane seats so a six-year-old child could sit next to his father.

He was travelling from Phoenix in the US to Minneapolis to attend his cousin’s wedding and had pre-booked a middle seat for the journey.

Upon boarding, he found himself sitting between a dad and his six-year-old son while the mother sat elsewhere on the plane.

The 22-year-old shared on Reddit: “I am a plus-sized person as I suspect this comes from fatphobia. As I got on and went to my seat, there were already two people in the seats next to me a father and his six-year-old son.”

“When they saw me, the father’s face dropped although he tried to hide it I sat down and the takeoff went fine except for a little turbulence. However, when the seatbelt sign went off, he first asked if I could swap with him or his son as his son suffers from flight anxiety.”

Suspecting this to be untrue, he declined to swap seats and continued watching his in-flight entertainment. He added: “As someone with real anxiety I think this is a blatant cop out. How can you only feel anxious about flying and nothing else? Just have a drink if you feel a bit nervous! I politely said I would rather not to which he ignored me and went back to his movie.”

However, the situation escalated when the child began to cry out for his mother due to flight anxiety. The man recalled: “The kid started breathing quite fast and talking past me to his dad about how he wants his mom, instead of the dad moving to the mum’s seat he asks if I can swap with his wife, this is where I lost it and called him and his son out for wanting to move me away due to their internalised fatphobia.”

Seeking advice on whether he was in the wrong for refusing to move, he took to social media to ask users for their thoughts. One user responded: “Flight anxiety is a real and documented thing. Fatphobia… Not so much. Lots of room for mental and emotional maturing.”

Another user chimed in: “Booking a center seat for no other reason than you just want to. Being overweight in the tiny center seat, blocking a son from his father. Likely have your fat spilling over the sides of the armrests. Saying that you’ve got “real anxiety” not the kid’s ‘fake flight anxiety’. You make everyone around you have to deal with your sh*t choices and then you call them fatphobic.”