I JUST love taking my young kids out to a fancy restaurant. They are so well behaved. They sit quietly the entire time they are there. They laugh softly and politely and are so mannerly they make me positively burst with pride, said no parent ever.
Pre-children, most humans think restaurants are wonderful, magical places where you can pay people to deliver glorious food to your table and then have them do the dishes afterwards. They know that these establishments have fish-bowl-size wine glasses full of mystical amber and claret liquid, mountains of dreamy deserts and are happy places to while away two or so hours in lovely leisure.
Post-children humans regard restaurants much in the same way as they would look upon the seventh circle of Hell. They are amphitheatres of shame where we spend the evening ordering children out from under the table or removing the bowl of spaghetti from their heads, while child-free, terribly judgmental other humans look on while consuming sumptuous food and delicious wine in perfect peace.
Parents frequently feel a wide range of emotions when embarking on such a risky pastime as eating out with kids, such as fear, harassment, advanced shame, extreme paranoia and enhanced hearing which allows them to pick up comments from other diners such as "Can they not shut that baby up?" or 'We paid £40 a head to get away from our own kids just to listen to someone else's wailing".
Restaurants are cruel, unforgiving places for parents. Why do you think Ronald McDonald invented the drive through?
I remember some poor, unsuspecting relatives invited our family to a birthday party in a restaurant. We had but two children in those days and were relative rookies. Our older boy was four, our youngest boy just two years old. I have spoken on these pages before about how the child was nicknamed Captain Destructo when he was young due to the fact that he broke everything he touched, or looked at, or indeed walked past. Our relatives were blissfully unaware of this fact when they extended the welcome.
The visit to the restaurant was incredibly stressful from start to finish. It was a five-star establishment and was probably one of the first times we had taken the children with us to such a place. We were such fools then.
The four-year-old clearly did not understand the etiquette and spent his time either on the floor loudly re-enacting the crash scene from Thomas the Tank Engine or asking strangers for 'a chip' from their plate while the husband chased after him, apologising to everyone and anyone.
The two-year-old, despite repeated requests, refused to sit still; or stop yelling in the manner of a grumpy old man shouting at pigeons; or wriggling violently in an effort to escape to allow his long-suffering parents peace to eat their fancy dinner.
In fact, he knocked a fancy lit candle over and set the fancy table cloth on fire and we had to extinguish it by throwing several glasses of fancy wine over it and we had to leave the fancy restaurant with our heads bowed in fancy shame.
We vowed that night, as we sat in our car outside the chip shop eating fish suppers from soggy paper bags, to never again frequent such an establishment with our children until they were old enough to at least shout us a pint.
So it was no surprise this week when I read about a restaurant in Texas starting a new trend in handing out 'rule cards' to parents of small children.
The Mexican-themed Cuchara restaurant's owners Charlie and Ana have been handing the cards out to parents which shows a detailed illustration and instructions on how their kids are expected to behave while in the restaurant.
They say children shouldn't run or wander, they should remain seated, should refrain from screaming, throwing tantrums and touching the artwork. All the stuff kids are really good at, in other words.
Apparently the restaurant has had bad experiences with children doing all of the above as well as wrecking expensive artwork that hangs on the walls of the premises. Understandably, there has been widespread outrage across America about the advice cards.
I'm not suggesting that kids don't belong in restaurants. In fact, when I'm lounging, gloriously child-free, in a restaurant and I see parents fighting tirelessly against their new position as communal eating establishment pariahs I often raise a chicken-nugget-free glass of wine to their courage and ceaseless determination.
