Kids’ Zone in Restaurants

If there ever was a controversial issue, this is it.

It seems people who frequent restaurants have been complaining about disturbances, by children and their family, while dining. You can say this is understandable. After all, you go out to a restaurant for a relaxing experience.

If you are a parent, then you might have a different take on the situation, depending on what day of the week it is. And, it might also depend on how well your kids are behaving presently.

When it comes to how a restaurant should operate, especially when it comes to children and adults, things can get very heated, very quickly.

Regardless, you have to take many issues into consideration, from both sides.

After which, it might just be easier to implement a kids’ zone in restaurants to offer a compromise. Adults with children get to dine in an adult setting and adults without them can enjoy their food in peace.

An Experience from Hell

There are quite a few horror stories from restaurant patrons about how they had to endure bad behaving children in restaurants.

Can you imagine trying to wine and dine the person across from you, if it’s the first date?

Also, say you took a night off from your kids and then had to deal with the shenanigans from someone else’s family on your off night.

No one wants that!

And then in many occasions, the parents look on as if they have been defeated. Some parents do try to control their kids, but over time they have allowed such bad behavior to escalate, the children know not to take them seriously.

This is why it is important to teach your children good manners and correct bad behaviorfrom home. When you do this, your children will not be an embarrassment in public places.

They will be well behaved and not cause the implementation of such things as a ‘kids’ zone’ in a restaurant.

Other people can get very riled up about this and even recommend, not too kindly, that you take your kids to Chuck E. Cheese, Burger King or some other kid-friendly establishment.

What Do the Staff Think?

They hate it as well.

It is not easy to serve someone with a smile, whether they are an adult or a child, when they are inconsolable, hungry, demanding and not easily pleased. While adults can wait fifteen minutes for their meal, a toddler or young child will start to scream at the top of their lungs for their food.

And rightly so, because they are hungry!

Strollers Take up Prime Real Estate in Restaurants

Restaurants operate on how many people they can serve. They make their money based onfeeding and pleasing hungry people.

If you come in with a stroller, that takes up space. They can lose one or two spaces.

In addition, it might also be difficult to navigate said stroller around those tables and chairs. To accommodate this, they would have to plan their layout with a lot more spaces between individual tables.

That does not make sense to them.

Friendly Servers Become Unfriendly

The staff can also become less customer friendly when dealing with a family with unruly children. It would take a saint not to do so.

Some parents are even turned away at the door.

We have seen in recent years where restaurants are setting age limits. This is because younger children sometimes end up damaging furniture, spilling food on the floor, scratching walls or simply traumatizing patrons with their screams.

Implementing a Kids’ Zone

So you see, for those restaurants that do opt to have a kid zone in their establishment, this is a great compromise. It is their way of trying to accommodate both types of customers so that they can still have a successful business and maximize their clientele.

We must be fair in our considerations. We must consider all opinions, but at the end of the day, a restaurant has the right to do what is best for their business.

And parents have a right to get a babysitter or go somewhere else, which will readily accommodate them, with quality service, regardless.