It’s a running joke among my friends that every time I go to a restaurant someone will bring a crying kid in. It seems to happen fairly often.
One time, there was a kid running around while his mother talked to her friend and pretty much ignored him. He came up to me and put his hand on my leg, smearing gravy or something on my pants. His mom never even noticed much less did anything.
This. If you teach a child that acting up during a boring situation is an easy way to get some attention and probably go home early, you are going to end up with a kid who uses that technique as often as possible, and soon you won’t be able to do even routine essential tasks without meltdowns.
It’d be nice if this was a lesson that could be worked through entirely in private, but kids are rarely accommodating like that.
No, I won’t be more specific. I doubt you would believe me anyway.
You are definitely a lot younger than I though. Attitudes like yours would have been greeted with scorn when I was a child.
<Any moderately intelligent and empathic parent could probably accomplish the same thing with their moderately intelligent children>
Unfortunately, they don’t.
Most children I see around these days make me wish I were living in an age when children were seen and not heard.
FYI, most children I see around are brattish, spoiled sprogs, and that includes most of the children of people I knew. There are exceptions, but rare indeed.
<I think that synthetic vs. cotton clothing will be one of my lesser concerns>
In the event that you survived able to walk or crawl out of the plane, fire is the thing most likely to kill you.
Have you ever seen what melting synthetic clothing does to a human body? I doubt it, or you wouldn’t be so flippant about it.
Yes. I call them waiters.
Gannett News Service ran a story yesterday about a restaurant, Sogno di Vino, in Kingston, WA which provides a “Well Behaved Kids” discount of $4.
Most of the time, what I see is a kid who is fairly quiet when s/he’s eating, and the child is ignored. After the child is done eating, the adult(s) continue to talk, but ignore the child, who gets bored and restless. In other words, the child is ignored when s/he’s being good, and then when the child starts acting up, s/he’s still ignored. So, no real parenting there, just ignoring one’s child care duties.
If this was true it’d still be unacceptable - a public place where others are trying to enjoy their outing is not an experimental laboratory for one’s moronic theories of child rearing.
But that gives parents of screaming/misbehaving children too much credit. The distinct impression one receives is that they are simply too absorbed in their own cellphone yakking and other pleasures to care what their kids are doing, oblivious to bad behavior because that’s what they constantly enable at home, or both.
Let me guess: The 1930s?
I love East Indian food, but it seems that almost every time I go there are a lot of misbehaving kids dining in Indian restaurants. (And they’re not Indian or Asian kids- it’s generally white parents who think it’s charming to let their little darlings run all over the dining room and trip waiters :mad:
No. Even in the 1950s, children hadn’t yet been ruined by terrible parents, and yes, it’s parents that ruin children, not other people.