As a server in a restaurant considered "fine dining" I was constantly appalled by the behavior of people's children.
I'm sorry, I don't starch the 45 dollar shirt I'm required to wear EVERY DAY, along with the slacks I have to have neatly pressed EVERY DAY, and the shoes I have to polish EVERY DAY, let alone the white apron I have to have starched so heavily it stands up on its own EVERY DAY, for your little shitfactory to come in and defile the restaurant I spent countless hours cleaning, dusting, vacuuming, and serving food in, LET ALONE having that same little crapdumpster throw his food on my uniform. If I
have to put up with that (as a server, there's little choice but to grin and bear), there's no way in HELL that you're bringing outside food into my damned restaurant.
That's the mentality I used to have. I didn't care if it was a sippie cup of juice--we served apple juice, grape juice, orange juice, grapefruit juice, milk, pink lemonade, water, iced tea, or hell even bottled water
in covered children's cups with straws. There's no excuse for a parent to take a child somewhere that the parent wants to eat and let the child dictate what food it was going to eat (outside of deciding between menu items themselves).
I had all sorts of ways to embarass the shit out of those who considered my restaurant a daycare that their child had the run of. "Oh my goodness! Did that plate come out of the kitchen with all those crayon marks all over it?! I apologize profusely, there's no excuse for that to have happened. I'll speak with the kitchen manager, and the dishwasher will be reprimanded." That one had the mother say "oh, my son colored it" shamelessly...which the boy then decided to try and deny (as he thought I'd given him an out) by saying, "No I didn't." That got the kid a slap across the back of the head. Apparently lying is bad enough for punishment, but there's nothing wrong with the vandalism of other people's property.
I know, I know, I'm not a parent. I'm 21 and have neither spouse nor child. But what I do have is experience teaching children one of the single most complex activities for anyone to learn--proper swimming. If I could handle a class if 3-9 year olds, 4-8 at a time, and still manage to keep them under control along with teaching each one of them, I'm sure someone can handle a single four year old and keep him in his seat through 45 minutes of dinner. I taught swimming hands-on for 13 months as I was 17-18 years old. I got recognized as having the best behaved classes in the YMCA I taught at. And it wasn't once--it was every single session for over a year. Because if I told a child he was going to sit still and wait his turn or he'd sit out, by God I sat him out. If I told him I wasn't going to put him underwater until he was ready, I didn't do it. It was a matter of consistency and the children knowing that I was going to do exactly what I said I was going to do--good or bad. I sat more children out in the first four weeks of my teaching career than some teachers sat out in a 16 week summer (8 sessions of 2-week classes). Yet I never once had a complaint lodged by a parent because they knew I didn't play favorites, and if I had to get on their child, they knew I had a reason. But those were
my kids too. I didn't let any other instructor teach my kids, and I never once let another instructor call one of my kids on the carpet for anything. They knew that if it ever got to that point, I was unconscious at the bottom of the pool or hadn't shown up for work
