FreeDuck wrote:Like waiting for the slow motion waitress to bring the check while his kid melts and other patrons shoot daggers at him.
What I'm defending is not "bad parents" but all parents.
Okay, I'm not defending "slow motion waitresses," I'm defending all waitresses-- we're rarely in slow motion, it's more often that we have 5,000 things to do at once, all for people who think they are the only ones who've asked you to do anything.
But for example, yesterday I waited on a woman with a baby who had brought her own baby utensils. Well and good, but the spoon was metal and pointed like a little trowel (who designed a sharp metal spoon for a baby anyway, come to think of it?), and the baby was literally gouging it into one of our newly refinished wood tables. So what on earth stops a parent from simply taking away the spoon?
I really do give parents a lot of slack in situations where a kid is just having a bad day and the parent can't really think of what to do. But I've had a lot of jobs that dealt with the public-- librarian, sales clerk, waitress-- and I think I've had enough experience to see when a parent is just not trying. It seems to me that it happens an awful lot.
you might not understand the 5000 other things that a parent might have going on that causes her to be sitting in your restaurant and not performing to your standards of parenting.
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Certainly possible in many cases, but in this particular case, she was sitting there smiling beatifically at the baby gouging the spoon into the table, so there didn't seem to be much else going on. My "standards of parenting" aren't very demanding-- I do think that allowing the child to actually do damage to other people's property is going a bit far by most standards. Our restaurant doesn't make a lot of money, it was a big deal to us when we got that table refinished!
I agreed.
FreeDuck wrote:you might not understand the 5000 other things that a parent might have going on that causes her to be sitting in your restaurant and not performing to your standards of parenting.
Certainly possible in many cases, but in this particular case, she was sitting there smiling beatifically at the baby gouging the spoon into the table, so there didn't seem to be much else going on. My "standards of parenting" aren't very demanding-- I do think that allowing the child to actually do damage to other people's property is going a bit far by most standards. Our restaurant doesn't make a lot of money, it was a big deal to us when we got that table refinished!
I just found this thread and now understand Joe's wink to Soz on the announcement thread
I was a DINK during my first marriage, married to a man who didn't want children and didn't like other people's children very much. Eating out in that relationship was very stressful when other children were disruptive. I fully understand that people without children are paying hard earned money to enjoy an evening out and don't at all appreciate having the meal ruined by someone else's children.
Maybe because I was older before having children, or possibly carrying leftover influences from my first marriage, I too instilled restaurant behaviour rules with my children. When they were very small we would take them to places like Chili's or Boston Market. No matter the restaurant, our loudness rule was always that we spoke with voices that only our table could hear. Anything louder and one of us would go outside with whichever child was struggling and stay outside until she was ready to be in the restaurant again.
It didn't take me very long to learn to remind them about restaurant behaviour before going inside. Before we opened the door to enter I would ask if we were all ready to be in a restaurant. Once inside, a simple reminder of "we're in a restaurant" was all it usually took or, I might ask if it was time to leave.
One day at a very crowded Applebee's restaurant at lunchtime we were waiting to be seated, as were dozens of other people. It was winter and the kids were bundled and anxious. M was 2 and K was 4. Somewhere nearby a balloon popped, a baby started crying, and a pair of siblings started to hit each other. K grabbed my hand and started pulling me toward the door saying, "Mom! It's time to LEAVE!"
