skye

Dear Care and Feeding,

My wife and I and our 4-year-old son were out to dinner last week. It was a medium-nice restaurant, not fast food, but not super fancy either. My son is a normal, active little boy, and it’s hard for him to sit through a whole dinner, so we let him explore the restaurant a little. I noticed our waitress giving him the hairy eyeball, so we asked him to stop running. He was pretty good about it after that, but he did get underfoot when she was carrying a tray, and she spoke to him pretty sharply to go back to our table and sit down. I felt it was completely uncalled for, and she should have come and spoken to us personally instead of disciplining someone else’s child.

I tipped 5 percent and spoke briefly to her manager, who gave noncommittal replies. My wife agrees with me, but when we posted about it on Facebook, we got a lot of judgy responses.

—It’s Hard for a 4-Year-Old to Sit Still

Dear Sit Still,

Yeah, this is your fault. It’s hugely your fault. Of course it’s hard for a 4-year-old to sit still, which is why people usually stick to fast-dining establishments while working on restaurant manners. It’s why one parent usually responds to a fidgety kid who wants to “explore” by taking him outside the restaurant, where he can get his wiggles out while not taking laps around servers precariously carrying trays of (often extremely hot) food and drink.

A kid “exploring” a restaurant is not a thing. When you did intervene, it wasn’t to get him back in his seat. It was just to instruct him to “stop running.” You weren’t parenting, so a server did it for you. She was right. You were wrong.

Your son is not ready to eat at a “medium-nice” restaurant again until he is capable of behaving a little better. You can practice at home. You can practice at McDonald’s. You can try a real restaurant again with the understanding that one of you may need to take him out when he starts getting the urge to run an obstacle course.

I doubt that you will do this, but I encourage you to return the restaurant, apologize to the manager for complaining about your server, and leave her a proper tip.