Kids In Restaurant

[jweakly]

My Gf and I are having a disagreament on if it is ok for her 3 and half year old to play on the floor in a restaurant. Any input on this would be great.

[Calamity_Girl]

It depends a lot on what kind of restaurant but having been a server I would strongly say NO. Here are my reasons, a little child playing on the floor is not very visible if carrying a tray or a hot pot of coffee and very likely to be tripped on and the child could have glass broken on him/her or hot beverages and food dumped on top of them. Second, the floors of restaurants are not very clean, servers and people are walking all over them, the bathrooms, the kitchen and they are not being cleaned throughout the day.

[mygirl]

My thoughts would be that this isn't a good idea. When our daughter was that age we made sure we had plenty of things to keep her occupied while she sat at the table. We always went to places that were kid friendly and fast. No 3 yr old is gonna sit for very long. I am also a believer that we needed to teach our daughter good public behaviors and that meant learning how to sit in a restaurant. She is now 5 and she does pretty well - we still take something for her to do, but lately she has been wanting to join in on the conversations. Good luck!