Let Babies Live! Babies Don't Deserve To Die!
DadTalk notes that restaurant reactions to small children can vary:
[W]e generally have had good experiences in the handful of restaurants available to us. At a small Japanese restaurant, the kind waitress dotes over Seth and gives us a price break over his not-on-the-menu orders. We experience similar friendliness from a Vietnamese restaurant....
Other Americans are experiencing something entirely different....It seems the hip crowd is highly intolerant of children in places from Northern California to Chicago to North Carolina. I also have seen bloggers bitch about how kids are ruining their favorite coffee shops in the hip Los Angeles communities of Silver Lake and Santa Monica....
I fear that this trend of intolerance for children has been gaining credence in our culture. Americans today have such an obnoxious sense of entitlement that they complain over one of the most basic functions of life, growing up. I suspect it will only get worse as the population ages and becomes ever more narcissistic.
Amuse-bouche comments:
[M]aybe what restauranteurs are saying is that they don’t want children acting like unruly brats, or being unsupervised, as in the case of the (presumably described secondhand) situation at Taste of Heaven in Chicago: “Children were climbing the cafe’s poles. A couple were blithely reading the newspaper while their daughter lay on the floor blocking the line for coffee. When the family whose children were running across the room to throw themselves against the display cases left after his admonishment, Mr. McCauley recalled, the restaurant erupted in applause.”
Or maybe they assume many patrons don’t want their dining/coffee moment disturbed by young shreiking vocal cords....
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