On one hand you have parents letting their kids be naked in inappropriate places, and on the other hand you have paranoid parents who think every other person is a potential child molester.
Still, maybe OK at McDonald’s - Olive Garden, not so much.
Usually I’m on the side of the parents in these threads, just because I’ve found myself in situations where I’ve thought, “Yeah, someone’s going to be writing a message board post about this…”
But even if we were at a messy spaghetti joint with a 14-month-old, I’m having trouble envisioning just stripping the kid’s clothes off in the middle of a public restaurant. Wrapping a towel or something around him: yes. Going au naturel: no. For one thing, it sends the message to the kid that taking off your clothes in a public area is okay, and while this might not seem like a big deal for a 14-month-old, that 14-month-old is soon going to be a 2-year-old, and then 3-year-old, and kids have longer memories than you might think. Unless you want to be fighting constant battles with your kids about “Put your pants back on, we’re in the library”, I think it’s best to nip this kind of thing in the bud early.
Barney Fife: Well, today’s eight-year-olds are tomorrow’s teenagers. I say this calls for action and now! Nip it in the bud! First sign of youngsters going wrong, you’ve got to nip it in the bud… Nip it! You go read any book you want on the subject of child discipline and you’ll find every one of them is in favor of bud-nipping.
Apparently, so does common sense.
Topless toddler at the park? Cute.
Topless toddler at the grocery store? Less cute, but not a big deal.
Topless toddler at Olive Garden? Inappropriate and, again, potentially dangerous. Waistaff are running around with trays of very hot food. I’d rather not risk having any of it spilled on my kid’s exposed skin, if I can help it.
I see that nobody addressed the possibility that it was the parents that had the girls remove their shirts. “If you get anything on your shirt, you’ll have to take it off and then everyone will know that you are a loser who can’t eat right.” Worse than letting the girls take their shirts off in the first place, but I’ve seen parents like this.
It seems impolite to me, but not a big deal.
Is this bad parenting (save the part about being a loser)?
June or July I think. I was cashiering in a supermarket and this woman came to my line. She had a big order and her son was with her. He looked to be about eight years and all he had on were flip flops and a pair of dirty ripped tighty-whities that looked too small. It wasn’t even that hot out. Poor kid, he looked totally humiliated. 
We did have a no-shirt no-shoes no-service policy but did not enforce it for children (they had to stay in the cart if barefoot).
There are things called napkins or bibs. And the kids could wear something not so good and easy to wash.
Park, okay. I’m against toplessness in supermarkets myself. Olive Garden, no way. And five year olds are plenty old enough to wear a shirt all the time.
Eh. Kids at 2 and 5 don’t belong there, because they generally can’t sit still or shut up enough not to annoy the people who want to have a peaceful meal.
PS “Ooh, I’m apathetic, I don’t give a shit about what other people do with their loud smelly ass naked offspring, look at me”
That spaghetti is eight dollars for a reason, dammit.
I really dont see what the big deal is. They are children. Children exist. Sometimes, they go out in public. Sometimes they act like children. Why get all worked up about it? There is absolutly nothing interesting about the sight of a topless two year old.
Honestly, dont you all have anything better to do than look around at people in restaurants snickering at them?
The point is that parents exist (in a society like ours) to provide socialization. They aren’t doing it. That makes the rest of us uneasy and (I’ll admit it) judgemental. That’s how social constructs perpetuate - you don’t follow them, we disapprove and you shape up. Or not, and eventually, we’ll remove you from our society.
There are plenty of places where kids can appropriately go topless. Olive Garden isn’t yet one of them.
In this case, it’s “a big deal” because it illustrates a fear that a lot of people have - that kids aren’t going to share our societal rules. That’s scary, at a fundamental psychological level. After all (says our monkey brain), if these kids aren’t taught something so simple as keeping their shirts on in a restaurant, how on earth will they learn to care for their fellow man and pay their taxes and choose good nursing homes for us?! Ridiculous, on a literal level? Sure. But try arguing with your subconscious sometime and tell me how far you get.
Eliminate those social constructs completely, and you’ll have…well, I’m not sure what. I’ve never seen an instance of a group of people NOT having social mores, and I’m not sure it’s possible. We can have different mores, but not none.
Your scenario sounds like a punishment. The girls seemed perfectly happy to go shirtless.
Properly brought up five year olds are plenty old enough to go to restaurants like Olive Garden. Even two year olds, assuming the parents have enough guts to take them out if they cause problems.
It sounds like the kids were well behaved except for the shirts - and I can’t imagine well brought up kids not putting them back on if told too. You can’t expect them to know it’s wrong, after all.
This is not okay. I get that kids will be kids, but if I have to wear a shirt so do they. They don’t get to steal because they are kids, they don’t get to dance on the tables because they are kids, they have to follow all the same rules as adults do.
Also, kids often times don’t know where to stop. I was driving from my place to my parent’s house about 6 months ago and there were these 2 little girls, maybe 6 and 7, in their front yard. As I drove by they both lifted their shirts to flash me (well, flash me as well as a 6 and 7 year old can seeing as they lack breasts and all). I kind of laughed because it was unexpected and they are on their own property not bothering anyone or lighting anything on fire. Besides, I was a stupid 6 year old girl once myself so I cut them a little slack. Then on the way back home about half an hour later I saw one of the girls face down in the other one’s bare naked hoo-ha. Seriously. Children going down on other children in full view of the public. I pulled over and walked up to the house they were in front of and told their mother exactly what I saw because this was too much. These little girls don’t know if a pedophile lives on that block or drives down that street. If these girls had been taught that public nakedness is not okay maybe they would have confined their experimentation to a bedroom or at least a fenced in back yard other people can’t see into.
Whenever our daughter is just wearing a diaper, we call her “Wal-Mart baby!”
At home. Going out, we’re the ultra-uptight parents. She doesn’t even wear dresses unless he has those panties over her diaper.
Because it’s never too early to start teaching children how society behaves. The concept that “we wear clothes in public” isn’t too difficult to grasp, so it’s a good place to start.
Teaching children = parenting. Letting your children set the rules = bad idea.
Thank you. I was hoping someone would point this out. Children grow up in an environment that includes other people, and they need to learn as young as they are able how to appropriately intereact with people who aren’t as infatuated with them as mommy and daddy.
Can’t say it would have bothered me in the slightest. My kids have been known to run around stark naked in semi-public places (admittedly that was a riverbank, not a restaurant).
well, that “admittedly” does make a world of difference, though. There’s a societal expectation that when water is near, clothes will be dispensed with, more or less, and kids get much more slack as to how many clothes come off. Restaurants don’t come with any such expectation.
So parents need to teach kids the difference between playing in the river, and dining in a restaurant. Shouldn’t be that difficult.