I rarely eat out but I have worked in restaurants off and on for almost 10 years. Plenty of asshole/screaming/neglected kids. Some parents are almost unbelievably bad at their job. Even those who seem to be otherwise normal, seem to think it’s just fine to let their children run or crawl around a busy restaurant full of servers carrying burning hot food…
I guess maybe we don’t eat out enough to have noticed the issue. We make a decent enough living, but eating at a family restaurant with two adults and two kids costs about $80 - $100 here.
I can’t do that once every week or two.
I eat out more often in more different places, and fly more often, than average because of my work.
I’ve rarely come across badly behaved kids in restaurants and not even very often on planes, where conditions are ideal for crankiness and restlessness.
I do recognize that I’m more tolerant than many in that little kids’ voices don’t bother me and a few minutes of baby crying hardly registers.
Even allowing for that, I can’t reconcile my own experience with that of some people who eat ot lessss, fly less, but report frequent and flagrant assaults on their ears and even their persons. It gets especially absurd on the internet, although I uspect exaggeration and the net go together; it’s so easy to stretch things to prove a point when it’s anonymous and impersonal.
On the other hand, I’ve never quite figured out what one wold gain from exaggerating bad behavior of children. It’s often followed by reference to the “good old days,” in one form or another, which to my mind at leat were not really much different in this respect.
Cecil himself debunked the concept of the “sugar rush”
To summarize in blinded studies there was no evidence that children who received sugar acted any differently than those who didn’t. In one study, however, parents who were told their children had received sugar were more likely to report that their children were hyperactive afterwards even if the children were in the control group and had not received the sugar.
Now that IS true.
Really? We go out every Sunday. With three kids, who behave themselves. We’ve done this for, I think, their whole lives (oldest is 17).
About ten years ago my mother, step-father, sister and her family, and I met for brunch. My three-year-old nephew was running around the place. I was seriously tempted to take off my belt and tie him to a chair. His mom & dad did nothing. I leaned to my mom and asked, ‘Did I behave like that when I was his age?’ My mom said, ‘No. You weren’t allowed to.’
Isn’t that place basically a Chuck E Cheese? Not exactly a place I would expect a quiet dinner!
I checked their website and they bill themselves as a family entertainment center…
And there’s a key to well-behaved children in public. Not the only one (proper training for older kids to behave well without constant attention is important), but it’s a major factor behind restaurant meltdowns.
What I see happening frequently at restaurants is parents overstaying their visits - gabbing (to each other or disembodied voices on cellphones) over the wreckage of long-ago consumed food and drink, while their kids grow more and more bored. Ignored, the kids become louder and louder, get up, wander and sometimes race around the restaurant, while the parents and other alleged adults at the table remain oblivious. Then of course when the entourage finally gets it into its head that the party’s over, they take forever to assemble themselves and their brats into outdoor gear, gather up whatever crap they brought with them and exit the place.*
*one of Jackmannii’s Laws of Dining Out is that the more obnoxious a group of diners is, the more time it will take to finish its meal and depart. This relationship can be mathematically plotted.
**another of Jackmannii’s Laws is that the person at the adjoining table with the loudest, most irritating voice inevitably dominates the conversation.
No, you’re right. I’m more talking about the level of craziness that goes on there. It’s more insane than any Chuck E Cheese I’ve ever been to, and the food is really wretched.
Most of the misbehaving kids I’ve encountered fell under:
- evidently tired,
- evidently coming down with something,
- or tourists - which would lead to being tired, overexcited, and may have led to dealing with “strange” food or with food that had the same name but not quite the same recipe as foods back home.
I don’t have half as much of a problem with Little Bryan pulling on my hair as with Bryanmom telling me not to yell at her child when I yelp in pain and surprise. What can I say, a world-famous restaurant is not the kind of place where I expect my hair pulled!
My team has been eating at family restaurants 4 times/week since last October. Saw a kid who was hyper once, but his mother kept him restricted to a specific area (not physically, she’d just tell him “no” whenever he went away from the table).
It’s absolutely whether the parent cares or not. If the child is crying but the parents are doing everything to shush it, right up to taking it outside or into the foyer, fine. But like it or not, there ARE parents who ignore it or worse, go to the “Shut up and eat your veggies” response. Not useful and these parents are assholes. You can’t bring a small child and not feed it on time and not engage its attention. It (he or she, doesn’t matter) doesn’t know how to deal with the horrible issues - and they are horrible, at that age - of being hungry, or tired, or cranky.
If parents care, they know what most of the crying means. Bring snacks, toys, entertainment. And keep your kid to kid-friendly areas if you think they don’t know how to behave.
Before I was a parent, I once went to a nerdy goth bar for a night of Talisman (a super-nerdy hours-long fantasy board game). One of the players brought her two-year-old son there and basically ignored him while she played. At some point he started whining about being hungry, and she snapped at him, “You should have eaten when I gave you dinner!” When he wandered away toward the steep staircase, she ignored him, and ignored me when I went to retrieve him.
I am deeply ashamed that I didn’t do more for that poor kid.
I see misbehaving kids every now and then, but the parents are usually just as bad. Most of the time when I see a screaming infant, mom or dad is trying to sooth him or her. Most kids that I see are loud, but not screaming, just loud. Like normal kids.
I don’t think it’s so much if the kids are yelling and screaming, but that the parents are making no attempt to make them behave, or discipline them. Crying, well, kids are going to cry. It’s the parents’ reaction to it that makes the difference.
For example, a couple of months ago I was at the library and a woman and her kids were coming downstairs from the childrens’ section. The boy must have been only about three or four, and he was wailing and yelling, “I’ll be good! I’ll be good!” Nope, Mom wasn’t buying it. They all left. 
That’s usually how most parents I know react.
Agreed. The other day I was having lunch with my three year old in a Whole Foods. He was talking a bit loudly, but not doing anything else remotely untoward or inappropriate. A woman sitting just behind him kept glaring at us. Lady, it’s a supermarket. If you want to eat in silence, you’re in the wrong place.
I don’t have kids, don’t much care for their company either if I have a choice. We eat out a fair amount because I like good food and I’m an indifferent cook. I CAN make a decent meal, I just don’t enjoy it and nothing tops a really good meal professionally prepared and served.
And nothing can sour a lovely evening out like screaming kids who’s parents won’t even acknowledge that there’s an issue.
I understand that babies fuss and cry. I understand that toddlers get overexcited and forget to talk quietly, or get tired and tantrum-y. That’s fine, it’s the nature of the beast, so to speak. What I object to is ceaseless wailing or hyperactivity that is allowed, and (yes I’ve seen it) even encouraged by the adult in charge. Parents who have a kid having a moment, and who are doing their best to soothe, distract and/or remove have my wholehearted sympathy and gratitude. Parenting is not an easy job - why do you think I remain kidless??
I once was on a plane heading across the country. The was a woman a few rows ahead and across the aisle in a bulkhead section. She had 3 kids with her, all under 6-ish, and she was alone. I was horrified at first, and I expected the worst.
There was not a peep out of them the whole trip. I think the baby may have cried a bit on takeoff or landing because of the pressure change, but otherwise those kids were perfect. And they were perfect because Mom was prepared. She hardly sat down, she certainly didn’t get to sit still and snooze. She had snacks and books and games galore, once she asked the flight attendant to keep an eye on the sleeping baby while she took the other two to the bathroom all the way in the back - just for something to do because there was a bathroom just a bit in fron of their seats. I was very, very impressed and grateful. And my standards for what a single adult can accomplish with kids and manners went up exponentially 
I have had experiences like this in a restaurant, and on one occasion commented to the parents on the way out about how nicely their kids had behaved (they seemed to appreciate the compliment). And I mentioned in a recent thread about how a godawful piercing little-girl shriek from an unseen table nearby practically drilled a hole through our eardrums and shattered the glassware, to be followed a short time later by a parent peering over the back of our booth and apologizing - unprecedented in our experience.
There are definitely fine parents out there - they just get overshadowed by the lazy, clueless ones.
[quote=“bump, post:38, topic:649666”]
Hahahaa… That’s hysterical.
How many toddlers have you ever taken to a restaurant? QUOTE]
None, because I wouldn’t want to ruin other people’s dining experience
Time was when people didn’t take toddlers to restaurants, because they didn’t want to disturb other people.
I’m guessing that was long before most of the contributors to this thread were born, though.
[quote=“Doggo, post:78, topic:649666”]
What times was that? Enlighten us.
It’s entirely possible some of our posters grew up in a time and place when toddlers and children rarely went out to eat, because back in the day people didn’t eat out as much as they do now. The practice of eating in a restaurant on a regular basis is something that hasn’t always been widespread. In the 1950s or 1960s, for a lot of middle class people, eating out was a special-occasion-only thing, a rare treat. Indeed, one of the reasons fast food became as popular as it did as quickly as it did was that it enabled people to eat out affordably.
The idea of having restaurants that catered to families is a relatively recent one. Such places were pretty rare 40 years ago. Most people did not take their kids out to eat back then because they just didn’t have a lot of money and places weren’t geared for it; the world just wasn’t very kid friendly back then.
Now it’s different, so people DO take their kids out more, so of course you are going to see more kid misbehaviour - but you’ll also see more kids behaving well, if you look.
Complains about children in restaurants and it being different than The Good Old Days are logically exactly equivalent to people bitching about how back in the Good Old Days, people dressed up to take airplane trips, but now wear flip flops. That is in fact absolutely true; people generally dress worse now than they used to anyway, but air travel in particular is a place where people dress like slobs in a situation where they would never have done that 40 years ago. But the reason for that isn’t that people are less respectful; it’s simply that far, far more people can, and do, fly places. Air travel was one a very expensive luxury; it’s now a fraction of the cost it used to be, so it’s become a routine, unglamorous thing you just want to get over with.