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No Kids in Restaurants
Haan Palcu-Chang
February 22, 2023
G’day,
In the realm of first world problems, is there anything worse than a loud and annoying child running around a restaurant while you are trying to have a civilized meal with a significant other?
Like, come on. Maybe if your kid was actually as cute as YOU think they are, we’d have more patience. But they aren’t and we don’t. Your tiny person banging on the table next to us with their cutlery is not for us babes. Next time please keep them at home or put the on a leash outside the restaurant. Geez.
Well, that’s one perspective about having kids in restaurants.
Another one in a recent opinion piece in Bon Appetite makes an interesting counter point and it goes a bit deeper than you might think.
Here’s the argument: parenting in developed western countries has, over the course of many generations, moved farther and farther away from the communal support systems in which human children have been raised for thousands of years.
Maybe it’s the commuter culture, or the lack of multi-generational homes, or the increase of contactless deliveries, or the “heads down, headphones in” culture in cities, but parents are becoming more and more isolated and so are their children.
Restaurants are one of the few public places left in our society where children and parents are forced to interact with a broader in-person community and represent a vital aspect of retaining a human connection together.
The author puts it like this:
The truth is that most restaurants are at their best when they act as a place for people to be around each other. If we exclude children from that experience, we’re only further entrenching the worst parts of modern society: everybody believing they’re solo entities, obligated only to their own self-interest, with no idea what it means to bend a little to give way to others, to automatically scoot your chair in so someone can pass behind you. A society full of people who are acting only in their own self interest is a society where everyone—even those who don't particularly like eating dinner next to kids—is doomed.
It’s a very interesting point and one we’re actually mostly behind. There is something lovely about restaurants and how they can bring many different types of people under the same roof to enjoy something together. And children shouldn’t be removed from that experience.
Thoughts?
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