The other night, a group of us took a friend out to dinner to celebrate his birthday. It was a quintessential retired boomers’ affair—the annual seniors’ half-price night at Mandarin, and free for the birthday boy! What senior doesn’t love a bargain and who can resist pigging out on Mandarin’s dessert buffet?

As luck would have it, we were fortunate to have been given a relatively quiet table in a corner so our hearing aids weren’t exposed to the usual level of interference of background noise that makes it so difficult to hear conversations in busy restaurants. As it turned out, we were not so lucky after all. Sitting at the next table was a young couple with three unruly children who all but ruined our birthday dinner in a quiet little corner of the restaurant. The children, all girls, appeared to be about four, six, and eight years of age.

If you have ever had the good fortune to eat at a restaurant in France, you may have noticed a profound difference in how French children behave in a restaurant compared with their North American counterparts. I view it as a parental guidance issue but I so wish the parents at the table next to us the other night had read the French guidebook on parenting children in restaurants. Unfortunately, they had not.

Whenever I have seen children in France eating out, whether it’s a local neighbourhood café or a classier fine dining establishment, I have never seen a French child misbehave in a restaurant. They are seated and remain seated during the entire meal. They conduct themselves like little well-behaved adults and do not at any time disrupt the occasion by climbing under the tables and over chairs, throwing tantrums, or annoying other diners and wait staff.

As we attempted to celebrate our friend’s birthday we were constantly interrupted by screaming, bouncing around, running back and forth, and playing piggyback to smack the glass aquarium and antagonize the decorative fish.

Amidst all the commotion, the parents were silently focused on their smartphones, ignoring their children’s misbehaviour and making no effort to curb their interference with the harried wait staff who had to navigate around them. It was all I could do to not go over and ask the phone-obsessed parents of those children to please try and control them.

As someone who hates seeing a phone appear during a meal for any reason (unless your partner is on life-support), I would like to suggest that parents use the opportunity of dinnertime to engage in real-time personal conversation with their children or whoever is at the table with them. It’s surprising how the art of conversation is being replaced by technology, which is unfortunate for everyone.

Are parents downloading the business of teaching manners to their children to teachers, or someone else these days? Obviously, many parents have abdicated their responsibility because I rarely see well-behaved children in restaurants anymore. When my husband’s grandchildren were smaller and joined us in a restaurant they were quiet and well-behaved. They also knew how to properly and politely address the wait staff with their food orders.

I know controlling small children in public is often a challenge but training should begin young and the enjoyment of other diners should be a consideration in tolerating certain behaviours. A friend of ours once told me about how one time her young boys were acting up in a restaurant and her husband stood up, tucked one kid under each arm, left the restaurant and drove straight home. It was quite some time before the children were taken to a restaurant again and the ground rules were clearly spelled out beforehand.

Adults can also be unruly and disruptive in restaurants which doesn’t excuse them from getting dirty looks from fellow diners. Eating out is expensive these days and no one wants their special lunch or dinner spoiled by inconsiderate adults or children. I sympathize with restaurant owners when they have to deal with complaints as some people can get quite nasty when confronted about bad behaviour.

Yes. I am a grumpy old lady. So what! I also realize that Mandarin is a family buffet restaurant and the rules are naturally a bit more relaxed. There are, however, expected standards for behaving in public and I would never do anything that would jeopardize the enjoyment of another family’s meal out.

May I suggest that if your children or grandchildren cannot be trusted to behave in a restaurant, there is always takeout or UBER EATS? 967-1111 anyone? I wish everyone would be considerate and teach their children from a young age that manners are still important—at least in my world. Am I being unreasonable?