W
hat are some parents thinking?
Recently, after spending an afternoon at the museum, I went to a nearby restaurant for dinner. It wasn’t a fancy restaurant – no fabric napkins or servers in uniform. But it wasn’t McDonald’s, either. The restaurant had table service, mixed some sophisticated cocktails, and has the sort of menu that invites conversation with the staff. Although it wasn’t one of those Los Angeles hotspots that seem to require a second mortgage to pay for dinner, the restaurant wasn’t inexpensive, either.
And yet. All through the bustling dinner hour, two friends dining together allowed their children – one girl, one boy, both about seven – to play. All. Over. The. Restaurant. They ran (yes, ran) back and forth across the restaurant between the tables. They hid under tables and behind chairs. They screamed. They sang. They called to each other even when there were several tables of people between them. You get the idea.
I wasn’t seated close enough to the two women to hear anything they said. But it was clear that they had given the children permission to be away from the table. Occasionally, they would look up and laugh at something one of the children was doing, as if it were the most adorable imaginable. (It wasn’t). At no point did they do anything to contain (and certainly not to stop) the chaos.
That was true even after another diner apparently asked the women to keep the children at their table. Again, I couldn’t hear what was said, but their facial expressions (and lack of action) made it clear that the ladies thought the other diner was the unreasonable one.
At this point, we could have a lengthy conversation about whether other diners (including me) should have lent their voices to the objection and whether someone on the restaurant staff should have said something. Both are worthy topics. But for now, I’d like to focus on the children.
Their mothers were not doing them any favors. Although the children seemingly didn’t face any consequences for their behavior that night, at some point they surely will. At a play date, or at school, or at a birthday party, someone will call out their inappropriate behavior for what it is – and put a stop to it. The children won’t understand, because they haven’t been taught how to behave.
And that’s the point. When experience shows us that children haven’t been taught appropriate restaurant behavior, we can’t assume that they have been taught appropriate classroom behavior. And yet, quite often, we do. The assumption that children arrive at school ready and willing to learn is rarely challenged. It should be.
We owe it to the children in our classrooms to help them develop the social and behavioral skills they will need throughout their lives. We can blame parents, but we can’t stop there. We can’t assume that eventually students will figure it out, or that “someone else” will teach them.
That’s why teaching to expectations is such a priority in our approach to classroom management. We believe that students succeed when appropriate behavior is taught with at least the same vigor as any academic subject: Taught, reviewed, practiced and regularly renewed. Children succeed best when they learn how to understand and manage their own behavior, and when the consequences of their choices are consistent, appropriate, fair, realistic and proportional.
If that sounds like the impossible dream, it’s not. Thousands of teachers have proven that, using just a few simple strategies, it’s well within reach. And, although it shouldn’t be our job, as long as we’re at it we should teach appropriate restaurant behavior, too.
