On February 9, New Jersey Italian restaurant Nettie’s House of Spaghetti, despite having a name that makes it sound like a children’s restaurant, issued a statement across its social media accounts that beginning in early March, they would no longer allow children under 10 to dine at the restaurant.
The announcement made headlines and points to the perennial debate over whether banning kids under a certain age from eating at restaurants is reasonable. This debate is, of course, not new. There will always be a steady stream of new children coming to restaurants with their parents, and some of those children will act in accordance with their developmental tendencies. Those tendencies—being loud, being messy, crying—will be misaligned with what some adult patrons consider “a nice time at Nettie’s House of Spaghetti.” It’s a tale as old as time.
But in all these conversations, the framing around restaurants is misguided. Dining has never been a matter of an individual's experience—it's a collective one.
The contrast and even the friction between different people—young and old, loud and quiet, all existing in the same space—represents a restaurant at its best. Taking a shared interest in the raising of the community’s children is an innately human practice that has all but disappeared from our lives. If tolerating other people’s kids in restaurants so they can learn to be people in the world is the last remaining expression of community-centered child-rearing, then I am solidly in favor of defending it.
It’s true that accommodating kids in a restaurant setting requires certain things from everyone involved. These could be material accommodations like high chairs, or less measurable things like grace and patience from other patrons. There are plenty of reasons to simply say kids would be better off staying home until they are old enough to reasonably ensure the continuity of the vibe; until they require fewer accommodations; until they bring less liability in the door with them. For their part, Nettie’s cited consideration for their serving staff when announcing their decision to go kid-free. The restaurant’s Instagram caption explained: “We love kids. We really, truly, do. But lately, it’s been extremely challenging to accommodate children at Nettie’s. Between noise levels, lack of space for high chairs, cleaning up crazy messes, and the liability of kids running around the restaurant, we have decided that it’s time to take control of the situation.” I think the wellbeing of staff is a very fair concern—but I don't believe the solution is banning kids.
Restaurants are one of the last public spaces that most people are likely to use on a regular basis. They represent a vital aspect of retaining our human connection to each other, and the people who operate them should absolutely be compensated in a way that reflects the value of what they do. This burden should be shared equally: People who go to restaurants should tip generously, parents who bring their children (which greatly increases the demands on the staff, even in the best of circumstances, as Nettie’s pointed out) should tip even more, and restaurant owners should pay their employees a livable wage, at the very least. Just speculating here, but I imagine if you asked most front of house staff if they would rather have an income that reflected the work their roles require, or if they would like to just take kids out of restaurants entirely, they would choose the money.
I’m not denying how objectively annoying kids in restaurants can be, but perhaps it’s an annoyance worth tolerating. After all, the restaurant is a perfect place for parents to teach their kids how to be people around other people, and the perfect place to teach parents how to shepherd their kids through the world. It’s the ideal environment, too, for non-parents to remember that they are part of a community, and that by tolerating kids in their space, and doing so with patience and kindness, they are upholding their own stake in the future of the greater community. Restaurants are a place where parents can briefly escape the ever-increasing isolation and loneliness of the modern parenting experience. Even if it’s just the passive act of enduring a loud kids’ presence with kindness, restaurants give parents a small, easy way to feel supported, held, and welcomed in a place that is not their own house.
Of course, no one should be taking their 18-month-old to dinner at a pricey fine dining restaurant like Le Bernardin, or at least, that’s not the case I’m making. Sometimes dining out absolutely is about having a very specific, curated experience, and young children are incompatible with that. You have establishments that are inarguably only for adults—bars and most fine dining restaurants—and others that are specifically for kids, like Chuck E. Cheese, where it would be weird or even creepy for childless adults to hang out.
There are, and always will be, plenty of restaurants that are either implicitly or explicitly not suitable for children. But in most cases, we have to more critically think about what role restaurants play in our communities, and who gets to be included. If you’re looking to feel like god for the price of an entree, and you feel like the presence of kids disrupts that experience, and that is the reason why you don’t want kids in restaurants, then your relationship to restaurants is broken.
The truth is that most restaurants are at their best when they act as a place for people to be around each other. If we exclude children from that experience, we’re only further entrenching the worst parts of modern society: everybody believing they’re solo entities, obligated only to their own self-interest, with no idea what it means to bend a little to give way to others, to automatically scoot your chair in so someone can pass behind you. A society full of people who are acting only in their own self interest is a society where everyone—even those who don't particularly like eating dinner next to kids—is doomed.
As more and more parts of our infrastructure—the car-centric lack of walkability in the suburbs, the “heads down, headphones in” culture of cities, the proliferation of food delivery options—move toward reinforcing our aloneness, the role of restaurants as a common space is becoming even more essential. It’s one of the last spaces where the humanity of others is so directly in our faces that we can’t forget it exists. Pushing kids out of these spaces isn’t just a bummer—it might hark the end of something crucial and human that we’re already losing.
Maybe this entire line of thinking feels like a reach, like a distraction from the simple fact that kids in restaurants can be annoying, but I don’t think it is. Humans have always raised children in the context of a community. We largely do not do that anymore. Both parents and children suffer because of this, with intergenerational health impacts because of this solitude—and we’re not broadly doing much to course correct.
What we should do now is ask how we can show up for parents and kids in ways that cost the rest of us very little. Continuing to allow kids in restaurants is a way for people other than their relatives to invest in the socialization of those children. And if you don’t value that, then you’re probably the one who should eat at home.