10 Tips for Taking Your Kids Out to Eat

When you’re a busy parent, going out to eat can be a godsend. There are just some days when you don’t feel like cooking dinner, you don’t feel like cleaning up the subsequent mess, and you don’t even feel like getting take-out; after waiting on other people all day, you’d like to sit down and be waited on yourself. Going out to eat can be a nice way to kill some time with your kids and relax as a family.

If, that is, your kids are well-behaved and everything goes smoothly at the restaurant. Otherwise, a dinner out can be just another thing that adds to your stress.

So below we offer tips for taking your kids out to eat and not only keeping things copacetic for you, but for the restaurant’s staff and other patrons as well.
A Preemptive Rule to Start: There Are Some Restaurants You Shouldn’t Bring Your Kids To

There are some people who hate seeing small children at nicer restaurants, and even as a parent of little kiddos myself, I certainly sympathize with their gripe.

When people pay for a nice meal, they’re not just paying for the food, but for the experience — the ambiance, the service, the break from their ordinary lives. These are not extras beyond the meal, but factored right into the price of the food itself. When you then bring babies or small children into the mix, and they end up crying/whining/causing a scene, you disrupt the atmosphere and essentially rob other patrons of the experience that they’re paying their hard-earned money for. It’s thievery by a thousand wails. It’s like wearing a sombrero to a movie theater. It’s not cool, and it’s not polite.

So you generally shouldn’t bring small children to restaurants where they run the risk of violating the reasonable expectations other patrons will have for their meal. Where they’re expecting class and calm, and a night that’s not like all the others they spend at Target or Cicis Pizza.

How do you know if a restaurant is too nice to bring your kids to? If it keeps the lights low, and doesn’t do to-go orders, that’s a sign. If they don’t offer a kids’ menu, that’s an even surer sign.

The younger your kids, the more conservative you should be in your judgement. There’s no such thing as a well-behaved or predictable baby, and their cries are actually evolutionarily designed to burrow into your brain and spike a dump of cortisol (so you feel alert and motivated to soothe the dependent creature’s woes); nobody wants a side of stress hormones with their meal. If your kids are older and very well-behaved (and predictably so), you have more leeway as to which restaurants to take them.

10 Tips for Taking Your Kids Out to Eat

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