If anyone knows me they know that I am of the old school belief that children should be seen and not heard.Do I dislike children?No not at all but I do dislike out of control wild children.I dont like being somewhere where I am captive ie in a train or a bus and have to sit next to a mama with wailing kids.I also dont like being in places like restaurants where people come in with toddlers and seem to have little or any control over them.That is why I like Dan McCauley, he looks out for people like me!
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."
