Monsters at the Restaurant
By E. Noel Preston, MD

   Andersonville is an upscale suburb north of Chicago, where a man named Dan McCauley has a cafe named A Taste of Heaven. Fed up by parents ignoring the bedlam of shrieking kids climbing over his furniture and flopping on the floor and blocking his wait staff trying to carry trays of hot food and coffee, he posted a small sign at kids'-eye level. The sign read "Children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven." Some of the children's mothers were infuriated and called for a boycott, believing the sign implied their children were hellions and that they were lousy parents. The story was reported in the Chicago Tribune and then picked up by The New York Times. Geraldo Rivera sent a TV crew to interview Mr. McCauley, talk radio hosts put angry moms on the air to complain about "those people" without kids who were intolerant of little children who make noise when they're hungry, and the restaurant's business tripled.

   The New York Times quoted one of the mothers participating in the boycott as saying "kids scream and there is nothing you can do about it. What are we supposed to do, not enjoy ourselves at a cafe?" and hundreds of other moms called in to talk radio stations to disagree, saying if parents can't control their little monsters, just keep them chained in the basement where they belong. Alison Miller, one of the other moms quoted in the Times, wrote, "I believe it is my responsibility to discipline my children and teach them to have good manners and be respectful," and even this relatively mild response to Mr. McCauley's sign resulted in Ms. Miller receiving numerous threats and insults.

   Meanwhile, back in Andersonville, most parents agreed with Mr.
McCauley. 88% of more than 3,000 respondents to the Chicago Tribune's web site said the parents who complained were wrong. 81% of callers to WGN-AM said they wished more restaurants would post signs asking parents to keep their children quiet. 97% of callers to the Daily Herald said they thought McCauley was right to post his sign. One of them said "There are many other places to eat and shop, so those of you who protest the establishment of behavior norms should pick up your misbehaving kids and take them to a place that will welcome you.

   The rest of us, who actually parent and try to teach our children how to act in public, will enjoy the relative calm created by your absence."

   Many years ago when my eldest daughter Caroline was about 20 months old, our family went to a California steakhouse for dinner.

   After we were seated, Caroline decided she didn't like sitting in her high chair and began banging a spoon on the table and yelling at every beat. She wouldn't stop when her mom and I told her to quit. And so I took Caroline outside to the parking lot and plunked her down on the roof of the car. "We are staying here until you be quiet," I told her, and we did. When we went back inside, she started howling again, and so we turned around and went back to the parking lot. When she finally quieted down and we went back inside, she sat in her high chair and behaved. Once in a while I see other parents do that with their noisy toddlers, but most of the time the parents just try to ignore their child's bad behavior and hope it will go away.

   A few years ago there was an Italian restaurant on Cheshire Bridge Road here in Atlanta named Camille's, and Camille herself was in the newspaper once for telling customers who asked for them that she had no high chairs and only a few booster chairs. People complained and wrote letters to the newspaper's food critic. "What kind of a family restaurant is this, that has no high chairs?" they asked, and the food critic asked Camille. "It's really quite simple," Camille answered.

   "This is not a family restaurant, it's a neighborhood restaurant, and we cater to the neighborhood, not to families." And her business thrived.

   Flushed with success at how well his sign was received,, Mr. McCauley didn't quit while he was ahead. He later posted an aggressive statement in his cafe that dismissed his critics as "former cheerleaders and beauty queens" who "have a strong sense of entitlement," and there are regrettably, too many people who are like that. My pediatric Registered Nurse, Susan, used to take her ancient mixed breed dog Sparky, to Happy Tales, a volunteer pet therapy program for hospitalized children. One day an irate parent registered a formal complaint -- not against Sparky, but against Susan! The child had been playing with Sparky and wanted to know how old the dog was, and Susan had carried on a small conversation with the boy. Later the mother claimed Susan had "engaged in inappropriate contact" with her son, and the hospital asked her and Sparky to leave and not come back. And so, some of these "injustice collectors" can make life difficult for anyone. But it's natural for parents to take umbrage at being criticized. I know that if someone had criticized me for setting little Caroline on the roof of the car and telling her we wouldn't go back inside the restaurant until she stopped yelling, I would have regarded such criticism as intrusive and nobody's business but my own.

   Life is seldom painted in just black and white, and nothing's as simple as it looks. There's always another point of view, and one of the more thoughtful comments on the Andersonville brouhaha comes from a mother in Chicago: "When you have children you lose at least some of the ability to come and go as you please. Your freedoms are largely in the hands of a small, unpredictable person. And because your small person is unpredictable... either you have control over their public behavior, or they have control over your ability to go where you wish."

   But your freedom to smoke stops at my lung's epithelia, and your child's freedom to express himself stops at my restaurant table.

   What's wrong with asking a child to speak with an "inside voice," inside a nice restaurant, or not to throw crayons across the aisle at another table? These horrible restaurant children will eventually grow up, and when they do they will be horrible restaurant adults, like the ones who take up two spaces when they park their cars, and who keep standing right in front of the hostess desk so that other customers are not able to ask for a table, and who sit in the middle of the room and talk in loud voices on their cell phones, and who laugh by throwing their heads back and braying at the rafters so that no one else can have a decent conversation, and who block an entire buffet by standing at the head of the table and not moving while they taste one piece of food after another, and who leave the men's room without flushing the toilet or washing their hands.

   My grandmother had a remark for people like this: The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

(This article was based on other articles published by Eric Zorn, John Kass, and Janet Franz of the Chicago Tribune. Read more about this subject at www.chicagotribune.com/changeofsubject . )

E. Noel Preston, M.D. is a pediatrician in solo practice in Peachtree Corners. 6063 Peachtree Parkway, Suite 202-A, Norcross. (770) 448-1553. More information can be found at www.PeachtreeCornersPediatrics.com

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