I’m fine with you throwing the water. There are two additional tactics I might have used, which probably wouldn’t have worked for you. One is to use my well developed parent’s voice of “Don’t even think of doing that or you are going to be very sorry” on him when he first hit your booth. With practice it becomes very effective, especially since it seems this kid has never heard it before. A kid running around is bad, a kid invading your space is not acceptable.
The second is to figure out a way to embarrass the parents in front of their kids. No father likes that. But I’m a guy, which makes it easier.
But I agree that the manager should have been on this, because a kid running around uncontrolled is dangerous in an environment full of trays of hot food and drinks. If the brat got scalded, it would be the restaurant’s fault, no doubt.
Same here. My kids are never more than an arm’s length away from a grown-up, basically. This past Easter, though, we went to a buffet with my in-laws. I did allow my kids to be off with their older (14 and 16-year-old) cousins, but that was pretty twitchy for me. I kept thinking that I should be nearby, ready to sternly glare and drag one of them off by the ear if they got rowdy. But I know that the cousins would not put up with any rowdiness.
Honestly, it seems that the parents described in the OP were dicks first, (ineffective) parents second. Who fails to notice a conversation between the waitress and the patron behind them about who can I speak to about this disruption, is there another booth I can sit in, etc?
ETA:** Lurker**, it sounds like the manager was a dick, too. No one felt like acknowledging your spilled coffee, for instance?
Crap. You need to document this, and send a letter to the restaurant company with a copy to the manager - and also find some review sites and splatter this story all over them. I trust you’ll never going back to that hellhole again.
We’d have left the restaurant when the kids misbehaved - running around the restaurant has never been appropriate. We did once or twice when they were little. Paid the check and left.
When I was a kid, there were good parents and bad parents. I remember getting pegged in the head by a flying dinner roll 25 years ago and Perkins being a nightmare for Sunday brunch 30 years ago. I don’t think its changed, but as an adult, your tolerance for misbehaving children has dropped.
You actually payed for your meal? :eek: Why on Earth would you do that? I would’ve just told the manager to stick her bill where the Sun doesn’t shine and left.
In my experience, semi-feral kids rarely respond to the Do Not Fuck With The Parent Voice. It’s unsettling. I don’t know if it’s because they’ve never heard one before and so don’t know its significance, or because they HAVE heard it but their incompetent parents never follow through on it.
The waitress was apologetic. She has waited on me many times and I’m an easy customer who tips well, so she is always happy to get me in her section. She cleaned up the mess, got me another coffee and threw out the wet sections of the newspaper for me.
My theory - and it’s just that, a theory - is that there’s some form of psychological mechanism that kicks in when parents are around other adults. For whatever reason, this mechanism somehow makes the parent oblivious to their children once they’re around other adults. Maybe their brain subconsciously assumes that their children are the responsibility of The Village (as it were) and so direct supervision is unnecessary.
I’ve seen this in action in several places and in several situations (I know, the plural of anecdote is not data). My stepsister and her husband kept their kids on a tight leash while at home; once the kids were at family gatherings, they completely stopped paying attention to their kids at all. It was like they assumed, maybe sub-consciously, that their kids were the responsibility of the other adults in the room.
A mom at church is NOTORIOUS for this. Oncer her kids are through the doors of the church, they are the rest of the congregation’s problem, not hers. She obliviously chats away with her friends while her kids run roughshod.
If I were to make up a story, it would be a hell of a lot better than I went out to a diner for breakfast after the gym and there were these two misbehaving kids with parents who didn’t care. It would have involved me setting the little shit on fire and using Ninja moves on the parents.
Parent here. There is no excuse for the parents in the OP, except that maybe their parents were as shitty as they are so they don’t know any better. You found a creative solution in an impossible situation.
It is not an example of how kids are different from in the past though.
Bratty kids I’ve seen often have parents who say “Stop it” all the time - and nothing happens. what is needed is a “Stop it or else” with the or else being some consequence, which doesn’t have to actually be realistic.
But this is much easier advice for a guy, I think.
Just like dogs, really. Telling a dog to stay off a lawn does no good, telling her it with a nice jerk on the collar works very well.
So give the waitress a tip and let the restaurant eat the cost of the meal. I hate to say it, but you’re part of the reason why the manager is useless.
I second that one. Or at least a story about what you wanted/wished you did.
The parents were horrible, no question. I’ve got a 6 year old boy and he can be a fucking lunatic at times; but it’s my wife and my responsibility to keep that in check. 90% of the time it works, the other time one or both of us are going outside with him to chill out or we’re leaving.
That being said, dumping water on a kid, whether or not it’s all cutesy and coy, is a pretty messed up thing to do for an adult to do.