I’ll add my vote to Jon’s, as a parent who is currently raising seven children. How bad does a kid’s behavior have to be to wreck the atmosphere of a coffee shop? It’s not exactly dinner at Antoine’s. Obviously this business owner has had enough difficulty with parents who don’t (or can’t) manage their children’s behavior that he is willing to take a stand — and criticism — on behalf of his other customers. Even Chuck E. Cheese would ask a disruptive patron to leave.
Would that everyone notice his request, and most of the others quoted in the article, was worded very gently, and the only children who might be excluded are the ones who prove to be disruptive. If the owner had been hostile, I’d feel differently, but the anger in this article was all defensive, and methinks someone’s protesting too much.
It seems like if we’ve been able to train six boys to sit quietly in church — those long Calvinistic sermons, too — since they were about two years old*, it’s not unreasonable to expect just a little decorum in other places and times. Thankfully, market forces will work for both sides of the present controversy, so long as no one is coerced either way.
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* And I guarantee that’s not their normal level of activity at home.
