One time on holiday in Sri Lanka, I went to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. Despite there only being one other couple in the place ( low season ) and many empty tables in a large restaurant, the staff made me sit right by the couple with their horrible noisy children.
I lasted about 5 minutes before I asked the staff to move me to the other side of the room, as far away from “them” as possible. Thing was, the couple looked at me in a way that was obviously thinking I was being the rude one!
All you kid haters realize that you were a screaming brat at one time in public too right? I don’t care if your parents beat you until you vomited up your liver, there was a still a time and place where you melted down in public or made a scene or a mess etc. Other people had to deal with it, as humanity has you know forever.
I guess I’m just saying some people need to relax and remember everyone is human, and if you are so tightly wound a toddler screaming ruins your entire evening please learn to relax before you get a stroke.
I’m guessing you are young.
Time was when children didn’t behave badly in public, though I suppose you don’t believe that.
this and
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Haven’t had the mashed potatoes but I’ve had the kids running around (and into) things while screaming. Add to that kids who turn around and take an interest in the table next to them.
What has made this worse is that a number of times I’ve asked to be seated away from kids and the waitresses have gone out of their way to build a fortress of children around me and this was no accident. The restaurants were almost empty when I arrived. I guess the kids must tip better. don’t know.
When was that?
(Attributed to Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Cicero, Hesiod and many others, and probably as old as the oldest of them)
Personally, after having raised three kids - who now are quite well-behaved and know their manners (at least according to the feedback we get from other parents when the brats have been out without us to keep them in check), but who definitely have given us our fair share of total meltdowns - my typical reaction to other peoples’ kids screaming bloody murder is “thank Og I’m finished with that shit”. And then I smile contentedly to myself.
Oh yeah. Twice a month? We eat out like 3 or 4 times a year! Actually I can’t even remember the last time we were at a restaurant as a family. This is completely in line with what I remember as a kid. Why on earth would we eat at a restaurant unless on vacation or entertaining out-of-town guests or something?
So you don’t have shop, cook, and clean up. There are other reasons. Nobody is saying you should eat at restaurants more often.
Also, she’s in NYC. People eat out a lot more there. It’s the result of having 1) tiny little apartments that are difficult to cook in and impossible to store much by way of staples in (so cooking means going out for groceries anyway . . .it doesn’t save you a trip) and 2) having lots of relatively inexpensive, fantastic restaurants around. We didn’t eat out much either, but we weren’t in a city.
Perhaps you haven’t noticed that we’re on the Straight Dope. Allow me to refresh your memory:
cite?
My parents ate out a lot when I was very young, and although I presume I must have had a meltdown or two, most of the time I abided by their “be polite and be quiet” rules. To keep me busy, my mother always had paper and something to write with on her. If she didn’t, the restaurant was always happy to give me extra placemats and a pen or two. When I started learning to read, I was allowed to bring a book or two with me. Or, depending on the restaurant, I could get up and wander around as long as I was in sight of our table just as long as I wasn’t in anyone’s way (one restaurant we patronized frequently had several aquariums, so you’d always find me in front of one).
There weren’t any Chuck E. Cheese’s or Applebee’s or other family-friendly chains in the area back then unless you counted fast food. Very often I was the only person under the age of 12 in any of these places. When we moved to the more kid-centric suburbs, people thought my parents were nuts not only for dining out so frequently, but for also bringing me along every time.
I have many anecdotes to back this up. 
I’m a veteran mother, and I have lived through my children acting up and being bothered by others’ kids doing the same. The huge difference is whether the adult is willing to control the child. There is what we have called “the lobby years” when the child absolutely won’t behave and one parent is required to do lobby duty while the other eats, then you trade. This usually happens during dinners you can’t get out of, while on vacation or some big family event. During the lobby years, I rarely took kids out to dinner for fun.
I’ve told the story on here before of a small child having a hysterical meltdown in a store, and the mother doing absolutely nothing. This was in a clothing store which sold Catholic school uniforms, so every goddamn one of us was a parent. We’ve heard crying. This was painful, meltdown, hysterical screaming. Everyone in this long, long line (but the mother) was in agony, both in sympathy for this poor little girl, and because the noise and misery was unendurable.
I went to the mom and offered to hold her place in line; her child obviously needed her. At first she was like, it’s OK but when she realized what I was actually saying (which was woman, get your child out of here now) she got all huffy. Everyone in line thanked me for trying, and she did eventually take the poor child out. But the point is, it’s really the parents’ fault when things get to a state like this, and referring to children as “brats” or “spawn” (or worse) is needlessly derogatory and misplaced.
Fine. At some point between then and now, children were well-behaved.
And it probably is confirmation bias, but there’s plenty of the little shrieking monsters so there’s lots of confirmation.
And some people just like experiencing restaurants. A day in Chicago (a simple jaunt downtown, as we live in the burbs) for my husband and I will probably involve at least two restaurant meals and stopping at a nice bar or three, plus we’ll eat out maybe a few times a month closer to home. We love experiencing both new and favorite restaurants, so we take advantage when we can.
And yeah, no one’s saying that you should be going out to eat more, but people who do have a lot more opportunities to see both good and bad behavior from all kinds of people.
And was this the only time you were at a restaurant during your vacation?
This is exactly what I’m talking about. You remember this one time. You either don’t remember or you don’t think it’s worth sharing about the 20 other times that week when you went to a restaurant and there were not horrible noisy children.
I’m not denying that some times, there really are horrible noisy children armed with mashed potatoes and shopping carts. Absolutely, there are. But I think what’s exaggerated and overblown is the prevalence of the problem.
Yes, yes they do.
Hahahaa… That’s hysterical.
How many toddlers have you ever taken to a restaurant? Kids under that age don’t even know how to talk very well in most cases, and expecting them to have particularly good impulse control or the ability to know based on the location how they’re supposed to act, especially if it seems busy and noisy to them is just unrealistic, and frankly absurd.
As a parent it’s your job to use those moments when they lose their shit or start acting like a little crazy person to teach these things, but everyone starts somewhere, and for most children, it takes a fair amount of repetition. I do agree that over the age of 3 or so, the kids should be well trained enough to not be a pest however.
And like pbbth said, there are some people who are going to interpret any sort of sound or cry out of a kid as evidence that you’re not controlling them and you ruined their dinner, etc… to which I say:
Get over it. You’re in a public place, and public places have kids. Beyond that, it’s one single meal, and provided the parents took appropriate action to try and mitigate and stop the action, up to and including taking the kid outside, then you have nothing to bitch about.
It’s the parents who blithely ignore their kids while they run rampant through the restaurant who deserve the ire, not the parents doing their best to be conscientious and responsible when their child does something unpredictable.
And yes, there are parents who do exactly as aruqvan says- as a teenage busboy I actually got my ass chewed by a manager because I had the temerity to stop a pair of children and tell them to leave the coasters on the tables and quit throwing them everywhere (I had to pick them up). Apparently the little shits’ mothers got offended that I actually tried to discipline their children. Uh… had they been doing their job, I wouldn’t have had to say a word.
To be fair, I think the difference is that children today tend to spend much more time around crowds of people in tight quarters than they did 75 years ago. There is more opportunity to witness a meltdown.
Time was when children and adults did not interact as much outside of the home. People did not go out to eat as much. One of the most common places that children were crammed together with adults was in church. Look up some stories of children misbehaving in church. It won’t matter what time period you pick, stories will abound.
I strongly suspect a heaping heap o’ good olde confirmation bias.