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this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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You can train your kids at McDonalds. And while I'd acquiesce about Applebee's, if alcohol is served, children shouldn't be. Sure that may limit what you can do as a parent. But I'm sure the joys and triumphs of parenthood will outweigh the loss of having a beer while your child knocks into other customers at the restaurant.
Respectfully, no. That's an entirely different scenario with entirely different norms, patterns, expectations, etc. A sit-down, table-service restaurant in a "boring" location with slow food is an entirely different experience than counter service at a fast food restaurant. You start with that, of course, but that's definitely not where it can end.
Not to mention, there are no casual fast food places that serve vegetables. If you care about offering your kids any kind of healthy food, you have to go somewhere at least slightly more upmarket.
That excludes pretty much every restaurant that isn't fast food. In some countries, that excludes even McDonald's. It definitely excludes Applebee's. It excludes Chuck E. Cheese, for crying out loud.
Maybe in the 90s that would've been a reasonable limitation, but that is far from the case today.
Nah, I'm not worried about that even a little bit. I chose to be a parent, which means that I chose to accept certain limitations on my life while they're still young. I don't have any issue with that as a principle. Yes, parents are still human and should be able to exist independently of their children, and yes, some people didn't choose to be parents (but had that choice made for them), but I don't think that either situation is a large enough situation to be worth discussing here.
What I'm saying is that teaching and training has to happen in real situations. It doesn't start there, no; you work on not throwing your food on the floor at home, you work on not shouting and screaming at the table at Grandma's, you work on not running around the restaurant at McDonald's. But once you have the basics down, you have to go out and actually work on them in the real world. That means a real restaurant, with waiters and other diners, where the food isn't exactly what they want, and it takes "forever" to arrive. It has to be in the real world, or else it doesn't work.
That means that your kids' bad days are going to go out into the real world sometimes, too; and you won't have any warning that they're coming. They'll just show up along with your basket of breadsticks at the pizza place, or they'll be serving them alongside the General Tso's chicken at the Chinese buffet.
At that point, you have three options: leave (probably not super feasible, you still have to pay for the meal and you still have to feed your kids and yourself), ignore them (this is clearly the type of parent you're frustrated by, and I agree, but they're far more exception than rule), or parent your way through it (which is honestly the whole point of this excursion). But the last one is the hardest, and runs the most risk of looking like ignoring if you have more than one kid and have to focus on them in turn.
Yeah, honestly, it does. Not all the time, but every time.