[Childfree] Fwd: article, At Center of a Clash, Rowdy Children in Coffee Shops

[Ellen Nedzel]

> November 9, 2005
> At Center of a Clash, Rowdy Children in Coffee Shops
> By JODI WILGOREN
>
> CHICAGO, Nov. 8 - Bridget Dehl shushed her
> 21-month-old son, Gavin, then clapped a hand over his
> mouth to squelch his tiny screams amid the Sunday
> brunch bustle. When Gavin kept yelping "yeah, yeah,
> yeah," Ms. Dehl whisked him from his highchair and out
> the door.
>
> Right past the sign warning the cafe's customers that
> "children of all ages have to behave and use their
> indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven," and
> right into a nasty spat roiling the stroller set in
> Chicago's changing Andersonville neighborhood.
>
> The owner of A Taste of Heaven, Dan McCauley, said he
> posted the sign - at child level, with playful
> handprints - in the hope of quieting his tin-ceilinged
> cafe, where toddlers have been known to sprawl between
> tables and hurl themselves at display cases for sport.
>
> But many neighborhood mothers took umbrage at the
> implied criticism of how they handle their children.
> Soon, whispers of a boycott passed among the
> playgroups in this North Side neighborhood, once an
> outpost of avant-garde artists and hip gay couples but
> now a hot real estate market for young professional
> families shunning the suburbs.
>
> "I love people who don't have children who tell you
> how to parent," said Alison Miller, 35, a
> psychologist, corporate coach and mother of two. "I'd
> love for him to be responsible for three children for
> the next year and see if he can control the volume of
> their voices every minute of the day."
>
> Mr. McCauley, 44, said the protesting parents were
> "former cheerleaders and beauty queens" who "have a
> very strong sense of entitlement." In an open letter
> he handed out at the bakery, he warned of an
> "epidemic" of antisocial behavior.
>
> "Part of parenting skills is teaching kids they behave
> differently in a restaurant than they do on the
> playground," Mr. McCauley said in an interview. "If
> you send out positive energy, positive energy returns
> to you. If you send out energy that says I'm the only
> one that matters, it's going to be a pretty chaotic
> world."
>
> And so simmers another skirmish between the childless
> and the child-centered, a culture clash increasingly
> common in restaurants and other public spaces as a new
> generation of busy, older, well-off parents ferry
> little ones with them.
>
> An online petition urging child-free sections in North
> Carolina restaurants drew hundreds of signers,
> including Janelle Funk, who wrote, "Whenever a hostess
> asks me 'smoking or non-smoking?' I respond, 'No
> kids!' "
>
> At Mendo Bistro in Fort Bragg, Calif., the owners
> declare "Well-behaved children and parents welcome" to
> try to stop unmonitored youngsters from tap-dancing on
> the 100-year-old wood floors.
>
> Menus at Zumbro Cafe in Minneapolis say: "We love
> children, especially when they're tucked into chairs
> and behaving," which Barbara Daenzer said she read as
> an invitation to cease her weekly breakfast visits
> after her son was born.
>
> Even at the Full Moon in Cambridge, Mass., a cafe
> created for families, with a train table, a dollhouse
> and a plastic kitchen in a carpeted play area, there
> are rules about inside voices and a "No lifeguard on
> duty" sign to remind parents to take responsibility.
>
> "You run the risk when you start monitoring behavior,"
> said the Full Moon's owner, Sarah Wheaton. "You can
> say no cellphones to people, but you can't say your
> father speaks too loudly, he has to keep his voice
> down. And you can't really say your toddler is too
> loud when she's eating."
>
> Here in Chicago, parents have denounced Toast, a
> popular Lincoln Park breakfast spot, as unwelcoming
> since a note about using inside voices appeared on the
> menu six months ago. The owner of John's Place, which
> resembles a kindergarten class at recess in early
> evening, established a separate "family friendly" room
> a year ago, only to face parental threats of lawsuits.
>
> Many of the Andersonville mothers who are boycotting
> Mr. McCauley's bakery also skip story time at Women
> and Children First, a feminist bookstore, because of
> the rules: children are asked not to stand, talk or
> sip drinks.
>
> When a retail clerk at another neighborhood store
> asked a woman to stop breast-feeding last spring, "the
> neighborhood set him straight real fast," said Mary
> Ann Smith, the area's alderwoman.
>
> After a dozen years at one site, Mr. McCauley moved A
> Taste of Heaven six blocks away in May 2004, to a busy
> corner on Clark Street. But there, he said, teachers
> and writers seeking afternoon refuge were drowned out
> not just by children running amok but also by
> oblivious cellphone chatterers.
>
> Children were climbing the cafe's poles. A couple were
> blithely reading the newspaper while their daughter
> lay on the floor blocking the line for coffee. When
> the family whose children were running across the room
> to throw themselves against the display cases left
> after his admonishment, Mr. McCauley recalled, the
> restaurant erupted in applause.
>
> So he put up the sign. Then things really got ugly.
>
> "The looks I would get when I went in there made me so
> nervous that I would try to buy the food as fast as I
> could and get out," said Laura Brauer, 40, who has
> stopped visiting A Taste of Heaven with her two
> children. "I think that the mothers who allow their
> kids to run around and scream, that's wrong, but kids
> scream and there is nothing you can do about it. What
> are we supposed to do, not enjoy ourselves at a cafe?"
>
> Ms. Miller said that one day when her son, then 4
> months old, was fussing, a staff member rolled her
> eyes and announced for all to hear, "We've got a
> screamer!"
>
> Kim Cavitt recalled having coffee and a cookie one
> afternoon with her boisterous 2-year-old when "someone
> came over and said you just need to keep her quiet or
> you need to leave."
>
> "We left, and we haven't been back since," Ms. Cavitt
> said. "You go to a coffee shop or a bakery for a rest,
> to relax, and that you would have to worry the whole
> time about your child doing something that children do
> - really what they're saying is they don't welcome
> children, they want the child to behave like an
> adult."
>
> Why suffer such scorn, the mothers said, when clerks
> at the Swedish Bakery, a neighborhood institution,
> offer children - calm or crying - free cookies? Why
> confront such criticism when the recently opened Sweet
> Occasions, a five-minute walk down Clark Street,
> designed the restroom aisle to accommodate double
> strollers and offers a child-size ice cream cone for
> $1.50? (At A Taste of Heaven, the smallest is $3.75.)
>
> "It's his business; he has the right to put whatever
> sign he wants on the door," Ms. Miller said. "And
> people have the right to respond to that sign however
> they want."
>
> Mr. McCauley said he had received kudos from several
> restaurant owners in the area, though none had
> followed his lead. He has certainly lost customers
> because of the sign, but some parents say the offense
> is outweighed by their addiction to the scones, and
> others embrace the effort at etiquette.
>
> "The litmus test for me is if they have highchairs or
> not," said Ms. Dehl, the woman who scooped her
> screaming son from his seat during brunch, as she
> waited out his restlessness on a sidewalk bench. "The
> fact that they had one highchair, and the fact that
> he's the only child in the restaurant is an indication
> that it's an adult place, and if he's going to do his
> toddler thing, we should take him out and let him run
> around."
>
> Mr. McCauley said he would rather go out of business
> than back down. He likens this one small step toward
> good manners to his personal effort to decrease
> pollution by hiring only people who live close enough
> to walk to work.
>
> "I can't change the situation in Iraq, I can't change
> the situation in New Orleans," he said. "But I can
> change this little corner of the world."
>
> Gretchen Ruethling contributed reporting for this
> article.
>
> Because of an editing error, an article on Wednesday
> about rules for children and parents in restaurants
> and other businesses misstated the site of an incident
> in which a woman was asked to stop breast-feeding in a
> store in Chicago. It was not the Women and Children
> First bookstore but another business in the
> neighborhood. The article also misstated the
> bookstore's policy for children who break rules for
> story time. Parents are asked to take them away from
> the reading area; the children are not ejected.
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/national/09bakery.html? 
> ex=1131944400&en=f276d61b16497954&ei=5070
>



		
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