Kids Behaving Badly in Public Makes It Difficult for Everybody Else

When the Picket Fence Post family was on vacation on Cape Cod last week, we visited Marion’s Pie Shop in Chatham, Mass. and let each kid pick out their own, small pie. (For the record, they picked chocolate cream, cherry and Dutch apple pies. Due to my dairy allergy, I, unfortunately, went pie-less.)

It was the sign posted on the outside of the shop that caught my attention: “Well Behaved Children Welcome. The Rest Will Be Made Into Pies.”

Thus I was inspired to write this latest column for Modern Mom about how I thought there was an unspoken social compact that if your kids act like heathens in public, you, the parent, are supposed to take the screaming urchins from the premises until they calm the heck down (as I’ve unfortunately had to do on many an occasion).

But apparently there isn’t such a compact after all as there are a ton of parents with kids who act like nuts in public and the adults no longer feel required to reign in their young kids. They just let 'em run around restaurants, dump merchandise all over the place and take them to rated R movies at 10 o'clock at night. This behavior is prompting people who are sick of all of this to ban kids in public venues, making things difficult for the rest of us who try our best to teach our kids how to behave and when they don't, remove them from the restaurant/store/theater, etc.

When did things change?