Hell, every Outback I’ve ever been in has been too loud to hear the people on the other side of the table. A squalling toddler wouldn’t make that much difference.
Ain’t that the truth?
The Firebug generally behaves pretty well in public places - we’ve gotten compliments on him from fellow airline travelers on that score. But if he got loud in a restaurant for long enough to pick him up and take him outside, I’d be doing just that. We chose to have a kid, with all that that entails; our fellow diners didn’t.
And I was responding to you, because you said How do you expect children to learn restaurant manners if they never go out to one? Part of parenting needs to be taking children out to various places and teaching proper behavior. Yes, that includes removing a baby quickly if they start to yell, but simply never taking a child out until they are 4 or 5 is asking for trouble all around. A toddler can be carried out fairly easily - a screaming, running 5 year old can cause quite a bit more havoc. That’s why I quoted it. I think that is nonsense.
I think children should be exposed to situations as they are ready for them. That is, the readiness comes first, not second. The notion that a 5 year old will cause havoc, screaming and running and so on, unless s/he as a toddler has already been made miserable by being placed in a situation s/he is not ready for which results in a certain amount of screaming is just nonsense. It is very popular nonsense but it is nonsense nonetheless. Proper public table behavior is identical to proper home table behavior.
The family restaurant thing is tripping us up I think – a family restaurant here can be identified by the presence of a playroom with child minder or indoor/outdoor playground, with a couple of other variations on this theme, in which the kids may romp to their heart’s content until the food arrives, and then return to after they are done. I have always thought this was quite civilized. But the actual eating part is again, the same as at home.
It must be, because - aside from a few outdoor fast food playgrounds - I have never been to a restaurant with a playroom, let alone someone to attend your children while there. When I say family friendly, I mean pretty much any place that advertises as such, offers crayons or balloons, and is frequently loud enough in general that (non-screaming) baby voices just blend into the tv and so on. I see these as practice for more adult-friendly restaurants.
We have kids with fairly adequate restaurant manners at ten and eleven - which means once a year we take them somewhere nice and they behave themselves very well and don’t mortify us. (St. Paul Grille sort of nice, if anyone wants to check out what I mean).
We took our kids lots of places as young kids - even babies, they broke their dining teeth on Fridays and Outback and Perkins and Famous Daves and Don Pablos. Places where its loud enough that you don’t have to worry about inside voices. And we did remove them if it ever got so loud that it was intolerable (only twice).
When they were four and five we took them on a Disney Cruise - a wonderful spot to introduce your kids to “fine-ish” dining. Dining rooms with full sets of silver, courses and multiple waiters and dinners that take two hours to eat - but a dining room FULL of children. As a result, both my children will eat escargot.
I still wouldn’t take them anywhere, there are places where I think any child, even a well behaved child, is not appropriate.
Pizza Corner in Valley City, South Dakota has a playroom! And the pizza is pretty good.
But you are right. At least around here, if you want a playroom, its McDonalds or Burger King or Chuck E Cheese…those aren’t restaurants, and frankly, in my experience, those sorts of experiences teach your child that its ok to take two bites of hamburger and then run around all the other tables screaming, because that’s what EVERYONE else is doing.
I think it’s a fundamental difference in outlook. I think those are signs of a family restaurant in a place where a restaurant dinner does not (as it does here) entail multiple courses and sometimes an entire evening at table. A place that has crayons and advertises itself to families seems to me a place appropriate for children to behave like children, which includes at least some noise and playing.
But I don’t think such a place is practice for adult restaurants, I think getting older is practice for adult restaurants.
I also don’t think a kids matinee is practice for grown up trips to the theater, I think it’s theater aimed at kids.
A child who has not been to a family restaurant/fast food place/diner or who has not been to the theater as a tot will likely behave, well, just exactly like everybody else at restaurants and the theater if taken for the first time after they are old enough to enjoy it.
The difference I was seeing was that what’s acceptable behavior at home is not always acceptable behavior out in public. The family restaurant offers a nice in-between stage where you can emphasize the proper public behavior. I don’t think it would be beneficial (or even possible) to train a kid to act as they should in public all the time.
Well, at our house table conversations are allowed to range over an entire category of topics you aren’t allowed to talk about where you could be overheard by strangers. We let our kids talk about religion, call politicians they don’t like “stupid,” ask questions about biology probably inappropriate to the table, gossip about their classmates (that’s how I learn when to say “no” to sleepovers) - and all sorts of other things.
You are permitted to get up and get something, if we forget milk for the table, or you need a new spoon - in fact, you are supposed to go get those things yourself and not expect Mom to provide.
You can’t tell fart and poop jokes, eat with your fingers, throw food, or insult anyone at the table. You are supposed to say please, thank you and ask to be excused and clean your place.
Well…yes and no. There should absolutely be times when kids are allowed to run around nekkid and shriek their heads off and all that other stuff little kids are so fond that aren’t appropriate public behavior, just like there are times when I can sit around in my underpants scratching myself. That’s kind of what makes home, home.
But at the same time, I think there’s a certain bare minimum of behavior that isn’t acceptable at home, either. No talking with your mouth full. No bellowing at the top of your lungs just because you can. No eating two bites and then getting down to run around like an escaped hamster. No gomming all your food into a big nasty-looking mess. And lord help me, I wish this didn’t need to be said but I saw it more than once when I was waiting tables, but no standing on the goddamn table.
If you teach your kids that sort of basic mealtime etiquette at home and are consistent about it, they by and large won’t act like heathens when you take them out in public. It’s not an iron-clad guarantee, of course, because even a good kid has to try stuff on the chance that Mom won’t beat him to death in public and all behavioral bets are off when a kid has been pushed past his abilities to deal with tiredness, hunger or thirst. Still, your odds go way the hell up.
This is something else that pisses me off: the idea that there’s something inherent to children that makes them incapable of eating anything other than chicken fingers, pizza, and hot dogs for about a decade. Certainly, children and adults have different tastes (e.g., kids like sweet things better than grown-ups, and grown-ups like bitter things better than kids). But a lot of the kid picky-eating bias seems to be to be something that kids develop because (a) it’s expected and (b) their parents don’t do anything to encourage them out of it.
I was going to respond to the same post, but **Marienee **has already hit the nail on the head, so I’ll just QFT. I wonder, does that person also make sure their kids start practicing sex at age 10? After all, you wouldn’t want them to embarass the family when they finally do it at 15 or 20! :rolleyes:
i was that age, and my mom removed me from the place and sat with me in the car until I quieted back down, had a bit of the bottle of milk and we went back inside. Not a big deal.
But again this was in 61-62ish, and people were more concerned with other people’s opinions…
You censor conversation at family restaurants? Why? Seriously, this is new to me. The only conversation censored at table in a restaurant that I can think of would be ugly comments about other diners, but that wouldn’t be something I would encourage at home either.
So why would you need to train your kid to signal the waiter for that stuff at a restaurant? I think my kids are pretty ordinary and telling them once would be enough to stop them wandering through the kitchen at a fine dining establishment, no need for intermediary special training.
The last list is stuff I expect at table at home as well, but even if I did not, I don’t see what is gained by having a special halfway training in a family restaurant at the age of 3 so your kids can learn not to tell fart and poop jokes at table at Chez Snotty when they are older.
Your experience was very similar to mine in the mid-late 70’s. My dad’s favorite saying was “children should be seen and not heard”. heh - probably still is his favorite saying. Something has definitely changed, and dagnabbit, I don’t like it. :mad:
Sure, over hearing someone else’s kids talk about dissecting frogs or hearing them make homophobic statements is as annoying as hearing a baby cry - I’ll assume that people don’t want to overhear my children say believing in God is stupid or overhear us discussing the symptoms of ebola. There are topics not appropriate for polite conversation - that doesn’t mean I want to shut down those topics inside my own home during the one time of day the whole family is sitting together.
Besides being, well, not at all the same thing, you do realize your silly sex metaphor actually supports my point: the learning process involves going out and doing at the appropriate age, not just staying home and approximating.
Okay, that’s a new one to me. I guess you win, your kids at least do need special training for the restaurant rules on what is and is not polite conversation for…complete strangers to lean over and eavesdrop on? How is it that they are hearing this again? Do they have listening devices?
Anything my kids can talk about at table at home, they can talk about in a restaruant. So it’s a problem I don’t have.
