Children – didn’t someone once say I love them but I couldn’t eat a whole one?
It seems to me that children are increasingly badly behaved and irritating, probably more down to my age than this being reality, but I don’t think there is smoke without fire. This weekend there were kids everywhere I went – Pizza Express, Wetherspoon’s, Pitcher and Piano and several other licensed premises. Some of them, in fact the majority, were well behaved and caused no disruption to my enjoyment. However, some of them were quite simply a bloody nuisance with their running around, screaming and shouting and generally disruptive behaviour. But is it the child’s fault? Shouldn’t their parents be controlling them so that they don’t spoil anyone else’s enjoyment? Eating out in Harrogate is usually a great pleasure as we have a fantastic selection of local restaurants as well as some of the run-of-the-mill chains. However, a meal out for a family of 4 with drinks and any other extras is usually the wrong end of £100. So, with this in mind, is it acceptable to have someone else’s rowdy kids impacting your enjoyment as they run amok in the restaurant, making noise, knocking things over and generally being a nuisance? I put it to you that unless you can get your children to sit quietly and certainly not run around the place screaming then you should leave the little cherubs at home.
Now, this may sound a little harsh, but if the majority of parents can control their children then why can’t everyone? I’m not expecting them to sit with their arms folded looking miserable for the whole time they are in the pub or restaurant but I certainly don’t expect them to literally run around the place while their gormless parents tuck into another 4 pints of Stella each. What right do they have to demonstrate so little control over their kids that they spoil almost everyone else’s enjoyment? Well, I’ll tell you – none at all. When I was a youngster, children weren’t even allowed in pubs and certainly no children would have been allowed to run around restaurants. I feel sorry for restaurant owners and managers who are powerless to do anything to stop the appalling behaviour of some children as they fear the repercussions on social media and via face-to-face aggression. However, their faces say it all as they clearly just want to tell them to fuck off and never come back! If they can read the signs, why can’t the parents of these unruly children read them too?
So how come it seems to be acceptable these days? I’m not up for debating the complex socio-economic background to all this, if in fact there is one, but in my view it is simply a lack of parental discipline or a knee-jerk reaction to strict discipline in the parent’s childhoods that is at the root of this. Or they could just be lazy bastards. You decide.
