Earlier this week, the owner of Somerville’s Dragon Pizza, Charlie Redd, posted a list of points for future customers with kids on social media. Redd wrote that his post was prompted by an incident when he asked a group with children to leave. I covered his list as a food reporter, because it was a notable tactic for a business owner.
What I didn’t expect was the sheer force of opinion about where kids belong overall, both on my piece and in a follow-up on restaurant etiquette by my colleague Billy Baker, and in several other stories about his post: Parents were lazy, entitled, didn’t know how to discipline or how to set limits, some said. Others were infuriated that families were treated like second-class citizens in our society. Gentle parents who allegedly didn’t discipline enough; old-school parents who believed in babysitters no matter what; people who thought that all children were born dangling from chandeliers and throwing slime on the floor — every identity and alliance seemed to weigh in.
And, as more people got in touch (and, yes, some were upset that his post made news), I began to realize that the issue didn’t just have to do with restaurant conflicts but more to do with a sense of primal fear, displacement, and persistent low-grade stress that makes so many of us, especially those with kids, feel about to snap a lot of the time. It wasn’t about behavior; it was about safety.
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There’s a desire for refuge and connection crashing up against a sense of desperation and alienation, and this struggle played out here in the most elemental of ways. Substitute “kids in a pizza place” with almost any tension point: finding a slot in daycare, feeling confident sending your child to school, wondering how to pay for college, wondering if your child is protected in this world, and the point remains the same: Parents — anyone, really — all just want to feel heard, seen, and safe. We all just want to feel respected and to belong.
And we are all so incredibly spent. We’re on guard. We’re tired.
“I think people are largely stressed and short-of-fuse these days. And noisy kids are an easy target,” says Rachel Hartstein, a parent of a middle-schooler who runs an acupuncture business in Lexington. “Do I think some parents are derelict in teaching their spawn how to behave appropriately? Heck yes. Do I think some non-parents are frustratingly intolerant of children in all public spaces (looking at you, airplanes)? Heck, yes, they are. We all just need to breathe a bit, methinks.”
In Mission Hill, Katie Genovese has a generally easy time dining out with her two kids, one of whom is picky and another of whom is gluten-free. But tension, an amorphous sense of us-versus-them, is in the air.
“I think it’s just such a hard time to be a parent in general right now. Every day seems like some new, terrible thing, and it’s scary to think about what the world will be like when our kids are grown. This, in conjunction with the fact that the pandemic majorly disrupted people’s opportunities to get their kids used to being out in public, so they’re struggling in these spaces and may actually be disruptive, I think may be very much setting people on edge,” she says.
“We definitely get the side eye on occasion, because there are absolutely folks out there who feel like if you’re under 15 you should only be allowed out of the house to go to Chuck E. Cheese. But my kids are members of the community. On the whole, they are polite. If we’re someplace that’s on the casual side, I kind of feel like that’s on the other diners to feel their feelings,” Genovese adds.
Today, according to the CDC, about 1 in 3 adults in the United States reports feeling lonely. About 1 in 4 US adults reports not having social and emotional support. According to an October 2024 survey from Harvard University’s Making Caring Common project: 73 percent of people think technology makes Americans lonely, followed by families not spending enough time together (66 percent) and people working too much or being too busy or exhausted (62 percent).
In their report, a vast majority of respondents said that finding ways to help others, such as doing community service or caring for others, would reduce their loneliness. To do this, they recommend a social infrastructure that enables people to find and sustain meaningful connections: The report recommended more access to community events, local gathering spaces, green spaces, playgrounds — more time, and simply more areas, where we can coexist, rely on one another as people, and see the goodness in others unfold in real time.
Holliston’s Jackie Cheetham grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. She straddles the line between Gen X and Millennial, and sometimes she feels slightly older than her cohort of parents with young kids (hers are early elementary age). She takes her kids to casual spots: Applebee’s; The Ground Round.
And she longs for the way things used to be — when parenting was less brittle and felt like more of a real-world community endeavor that played out in person. Now, it’s often a clash of styles and allegiances, virtual likes, and online digs.
“I feel like an old person saying, ‘When I was growing up . . .’ but: I grew up in Medway. People knew me [and my family]. People would correct me and come up to me, and that was an OK thing. As a village we’re raising kids,” Cheetham says. “We have lost that community village that, frankly, we need again.”
I see it close to home, too. In my town, there have been a rash of car accidents: distracted drivers on their phones or irate ones blowing through crosswalks and stop signs; near-misses and even fatalities. In one case, a neighbor’s son was seriously injured when he was hit in a crosswalk. Apparently, a car had stopped for him; then, a second car zipped around to get wherever they needed to be without seeing the person right in front of them.
I was on that street not long ago, at a four-way stop when another car screeched up in the other direction. We both instinctively tried to go first. Then we reflexively beeped. We were both impatient. I felt the bile rising in my throat, the tension: How dare they? I was there first. I belonged there. I was late for pick-up. My email was out of control. I was tired.
Then I looked up, she looked up, and we locked eyes — and waved. We knew each other! Our kids were in the same grade. And, for a moment, my tension melted with the spark of human connection. These two strangers in missiles going in different directions had something in common. And we both rolled along, a little more slowly.
Says Hartstein: “I think we need, as a society, to course correct. Children have a right to be in public. Parents have a duty to teach children how to behave in public. And bystanders need to let go the judgments and let live.”
Hopefully side by side, in real life, together.
Kara Baskin can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @kcbaskin.
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