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Oct 15, 2024

Will My Kids Ever Sit in Their Stupid Chairs? | Vogue

The distance between what I thought going to a restaurant as a family would be like and what it actually resembles is the same distance between what the people who paid for Fyre Festival thought they

The distance between what I thought going to a restaurant as a family would be like and what it actually resembles is the same distance between what the people who paid for Fyre Festival thought they were getting and what they got. It is shocking, it is dismaying, and it culminates in a steep bill and a plain cheese sandwich.

Were you to see me and my family in a restaurant, you would observe any or all of the following: Shouting, squirming, climbing over the table to reach things, gathering and hoarding of silverware to be used in light weapon play, whining for soda, whining for ice cream, whining for phones, whining for things that don’t exist in the restaurant or maybe even the world. Asking when the food is coming, when we can leave, or what we’re doing next. Refusing to look at the server. Refusing to stay in a chair. Slithering onto the floor like they forgot to bring their spines. Displaying a general lack of grasp for the concepts of personal space, the technical purpose of a napkin, or the idea that people can see them, and they should be embarrassed.

Spills. So many spills.

I wish I was sitting with you right now and could ask how old you think my children are based on the scene I'm describing. They’re nine, seven, and four. Did you guess younger? So did I! Or rather, I guessed they would have grown out of this phase a few years back. My plan was to keep taking them to restaurants, keep up the discipline, and wait for the habits to take hold.

They haven’t. I don’t get why, but I’m clearly not alone. Why else would a Georgia restaurant, fed up with antics, institute a new policy that tacks a $50 bad-kids charge onto parents’ bill? (Before you think $50?!?, pause to calculate the sheer ketchup costs your kids have incurred at restaurants.) There’s some confusion surrounding whether anyone has actually had to pay the fee; the restaurant says they’ve never charged it yet, but one customer, in his review, told a chilling story of being charged the fee after his child simply watched a tablet, then was taken outside when he or she got antsy.

Whether or not money has in fact changed hands, the restaurant’s policy feels like a fine point on a long-running debate about whether kids even belong in restaurants. This debate has always struck me as—well, sort of fake. It tends to focus on high-end dining, to which I say: You’re not telling me there’s an epidemic of parents out there who want to take their kids to five-star joints. There’s a natural barrier to entry. I don’t want to pay $40 for something my child won’t eat. But the debate speaks to an underlying collective angst: Kids can’t hang. They literally can’t sit calmly and quietly for the length of a meal. And this is relatively new.

By the time I was my oldest’s age—nine—I was a varsity sitter. I had been sitting in church silently for an hour every Sunday since sentience; at Catholic school, save for a half-hour lunch and recess, I faced forward in my plastic chair, ankles crossed beneath the desk.

By the time I was my oldest’s age—nine—I was a varsity sitter.

But my kids don’t go to church. Their schools offer a number of movement measures to keep them engaged throughout the day: Seasonally-themed yoga stretches, beanbag-studded calm down corners. And, as we work from home with our standing desks and our watches constantly urging us up, my husband and I don’t exactly model a lot of sitting still, either. Culturally, in terms of health, we’ve come to think of sitting like smoking. So it must be confusing for kids who have no bedrock sitting education to suddenly enter a place that serves food and find everyone treating sitting as a mandatory art. This is the empathetic mindset I take when my kids start wriggling at restaurants.

No, I’m kidding. I grit my teeth and hiss threats just like everyone else. Or I just go to a brewery, since breweries are bastions of judgment-free dining. The menus are really just kid menus with upcharges for gruyere, and there’s always a patch of gravel where my kids can play cornhole or simply eat the gravel, a sight that bothers me less with an IPA in my hand.

But now it’s winter, and we have to come inside. We must dine. We parents of young children will divide ourselves into our two indoor-season camps: The parents who come armed with tablets and more sets of personal headphones than a museum tour, who speak only to each other as their children munch fries with their heads ducked over a Bluey. And the parents like me, who are vain about their parenting and will only use screens on vacation, where no one knows us. Who maintain the ill-advised hope that this is the time the kids will be good.

But now it’s winter, and we have to come inside. We must dine.

Emily Krawzyk, an independent etiquette consultant and the dining etiquette instructor at The Saturday Club in Wayne, Pennsylvania, understands. She frames the dining-out battle as one that parents have lost before we’re shown to a table. “Your kids hear so many things from you throughout the day,” she says. “Sit up, nice manners–it’s just one more thing [to tune out]. And because dinner time is at the end of the day, you as a parent are at the end of your rope.” Krawzyk’s main suggestion for parents struggling with kid behaviors at the table is to reframe why good behavior is good. “Kids need to be told why they’re being asked to do something,” she says. “I tell my students: The focus of dining etiquette is to have everyone enjoy the conversation and to make the people around you feel like you respect them. If you’re chewing with food flying out of your mouth, does it look like you’re interested and engaged? If you’re sitting with your elbows on the table, does it look like you want to be here?”

When it comes to activating this education in real-world settings, Krawzyk says, she asks her own eight-year-old daughter for “five minutes of perfect manners.” “It’s a manageable amount,” she says, “and it’s easier than asking her to stop doing things. After five minutes, I can give her some positive reinforcement, and she can see that she’s actually capable of acting this way.” Krawzyk also suggests empowering kids to think of their table habits as a task that goes beyond being good, into the arena of doing good. “I put the emphasis on caring for others,” she says. “I teach: If you’re at a round table, and you would like some bread, ask for the bread and then turn to the people sitting next to you. Ask them if they would like a piece before serving yourself.” Similarly, Krawzyk says, impress upon kids that table talk is as much their responsibility as it is the adults’. “Kids should not just answer questions, they should ask them,” she says. “I remind my daughter: ‘Okay, now ask me how my day was.’”

This advice may seem counterintuitive to those of us battered by bad dining times: I can’t even get them to stop sawing at each other with butter knives, now I’m supposed to remind them to be good conversationalists? But something about it clicks for me. Kids like jobs. They like being treated as equals. And while you can’t always treat them as equals, e.g. when they repeatedly ask to drive the car, a restaurant is kind of a vacuum where, if they rise to the standard of your behavior, they can be your equal. They can make choices and speak for themselves. If they do their job, they’re rewarded.

But when all else fails, Krawzyk says, she’s not above whipping out the tablet. “Before I had my daughter, I would look at parents who had a screen out at dinner and say ‘I can’t believe they’re doing that.’ But now, I work full-time, I just want to enjoy a meal at the end of the week. It’s when I can’t deal anymore.” And, she adds, there’s a reason screens work well in restaurants: In the rest of their activities-packed, movement-forward lives, screens are the only time they sit still. The association is ironclad. When I remind Krawzyk that an iPad is exactly what one customer claims got him fined at that Georgia restaurant, her inner etiquette nerd takes over. She quotes the writer and poet Kahlil Gibran: “‘The real test of good manners is being able to put up with bad manners pleasantly.’ So it’s actually that restaurant who has the worst manners here.” Elegant, white-gloved snap.