At Center of a Clash, Rowdy Children in Coffee Shops

By JODI WILGOREN
November 9, 2005 - NY Times

CHICAGO, Nov. 8 - Bridget Dehl shushed her 21-month-old son, Gavin, then clapped a hand over his mouth to squelch his tiny screams amid the Sunday brunch bustle. When Gavin kept yelping "yeah, yeah, yeah," Ms. Dehl whisked him from his highchair and out the door. ...

Right past the sign warning the cafe's customers that "children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven," and right into a nasty spat roiling the stroller set in Chicago's changing Andersonville neighborhood.

The owner of A Taste of Heaven, Dan McCauley, said he posted the sign - at child level, with playful handprints - in the hope of quieting his tin-ceilinged cafe, where toddlers have been known to sprawl between tables and hurl themselves at display cases for sport.

But many neighborhood mothers took umbrage at the implied criticism of how they handle their children. Soon, whispers of a boycott passed among the playgroups in this North Side neighborhood, once an outpost of avant-garde artists and hip gay couples but now a hot real estate market for young professional families shunning the suburbs.

"I love people who don't have children who tell you how to parent," said Alison Miller, 35, a psychologist, corporate coach and mother of two. "I'd love for him to be responsible for three children for the next year and see if he can control the volume of their voices every minute of the day."

Mr. McCauley, 44, said the protesting parents were "former cheerleaders and beauty queens" who "have a very strong sense of entitlement." In an open letter he handed out at the bakery, he warned of an "epidemic" of antisocial behavior. ...

"Part of parenting skills is teaching kids they behave differently in a restaurant than they do on the playground," Mr. McCauley said in an interview. ...

And so simmers another skirmish between the childless and the child-centered, a culture clash increasingly common in restaurants and other public spaces as a new generation of busy, older, well-off parents ferry little ones with them. ... (continued below)

*  *  *

Well, I'd originally planned to focus on television advertisements here, querulously wondering aloud how, say, 16 fluid ounces of lite beer is somehow less "filling" than 16 fluid ounces of real beer. But this is an issue, like stupid TV commercials, that simply cannot be ignored because it will not go away. On the contrary, it comes at you every day, literally in your face, more and more all the time.

I really like the bit from Mr. McCauley about "former cheerleaders and beauty queens" with a "very strong sense of entitlement. " Also excellent is the classic overstatement, verging on hysteria, of Alison Miller's hyperbolic protestations about keeping kids quiet "every minute of the day," for an entire year, &cetera. ad delirium, ad nauseum.

OK, Ms. Miller, take a deep breath and try to stop hyperventilating. Nobody's talking about anything remotely approaching that impossibility. It's just a matter of keeping them reasonably quiet during the relatively brief period of time they're out in public, all right? Perhaps you need, well, a psychologist. Or perhaps two: a kiddie one for your two hellions, and a great big grown-up one for you. Oh ... and how about a "parenting coach," for that matter?

(continued from above)
Parents have denounced Toast, a popular Lincoln Park breakfast spot, as unwelcoming since a note about using inside voices appeared on the menu six months ago. The owner of John's Place, which resembles a kindergarten class at recess in early evening, established a separate "family friendly" room a year ago, only to face parental threats of lawsuits.

Many of the Andersonville mothers who are boycotting Mr. McCauley's bakery also skip story time at Women and Children First, a feminist bookstore, because of the rules: children can be kicked out for standing, talking or sipping drinks....

After a dozen years at one site, Mr. McCauley moved A Taste of Heaven six blocks away in May 2004, to a busy corner on Clark Street. But there, he said, teachers and writers seeking afternoon refuge were drowned out not just by children running amok but also by oblivious cellphone chatterers.

Children were climbing the cafe's poles. A couple were blithely reading the newspaper while their daughter lay on the floor blocking the line for coffee. When the family whose children were running across the room to throw themselves against the display cases left after his admonishment, Mr. McCauley recalled, the restaurant erupted in applause.
(continued below)

*   *   *

And here, Gentle Reader, I am compelled to interject again. There is a legal phrase one commonly hears on TV cop dramas regarding civil liberties.  Often mouthed by  one of those unreasonably attractive blondes usually seen depicting a crusading assistant district attorney, it pertains to "the realistic expectation of privacy." Perhaps teachers and writers are silly to expect peace and quiet in a coffee shop, or even a book store.

But shouldn't they have the right to expect those golden commodities at a library? Ah ... now THERE is true naivete! Only a fool would expect the New Kid-Friendly librarians at Your Community Library to enforce appropriate noise levels. And it ain't just the kids, either: librarians simply will not intervene (unless prodded forcefully) when someone nattering on his/her cell phone turns a study room into something more resembling a hotel lobby.

Moreover, this effect often enhanced by slurps on the iced lattes purchased at the library's in-house coffee shop (the librarians tell me they must offer this amenity so as to keep their "numbers" competitive with Borders and Barnes & Noble).

(continued from above)
"The looks I would get when I went in there made me so nervous that I would try to buy the food as fast as I could and get out," said Laura Brauer, 40, who has stopped visiting A Taste of Heaven with her two children. "I think that ... kids scream and there is nothing you can do about it. What are we supposed to do, not enjoy ourselves at a cafe?"

Ms. Miller said that one day when her son, then 4 months old, was fussing, a staff member rolled her eyes and announced for all to hear, "We've got a screamer!"

Kim Cavitt recalled having coffee and a cookie one afternoon with her boisterous 2-year-old when "someone came over and said you just need to keep her quiet or you need to leave. ..."

... Why suffer such scorn, the mothers said, when clerks at the Swedish Bakery, a neighborhood institution, offer children - calm or crying - free cookies? Why confront such criticism when the recently opened Sweet Occasions, a five-minute walk down Clark Street, offers a child-size ice cream cone for $1.50? ...

*   *    *

And I say: why endure the angst of disciplining your dog with a rolled-up newspaper after it poops in the middle of your living room, when you can simply give it a doggie treat, instead?

Oh ... and take it easy there, Ms. Brauer -- no one's gonna hurt you and your Precious Darlings, OK? Did we remember to take our medication today?...

But getting back to Ms.  Miller ... yeah, that's right -- the psychologist. I don't know how much, if any, Freud she's read (he's just SO unfashionable these days, you know), but she might find it enlightening to see what he said about children as "polymorphous perverse."

Based on what I've seen of college psych classes and the students in them, she may well need a primer; I'll give it a shot:

In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Doc Siggy described the "polymorphously perverse" child as a being whose libidinal drives are relatively unorganized, and are directed at every object that might provide pleasure. In the polymorphously perverse phase of development, the infant or child is not a stable or unified subject confronting and desiring a particular object, but a complex shifting field of force, of desire, in which the child is caught up. In other words, the child doesn't yet have a central identity or self, no sense of "I"; rather, the child is a mass of seething uncontrolled desires, which pull and push him or her in any direction, toward any object that might provide pleasure.

The polymorphously perverse child is pleasure seeking. It is not yet under the sway of the reality principle, and because it doesn't have to repress any of its desires, it has no unconscious.

Polymorphous perversity is the earliest stage of child sexual development, according to Freud; it may last till age 5 or 6. Then the child enters into the latency period.  If all works well, at puberty all the polymorphously perverse drives of infancy get channeled into, well, sex. The project of psychoanalysis, in general, is to chart how this polymorphously perverse, incestuous, desiring animal turns into a self subordinated to the reality principle, so that this creature can get something useful accomplished and not just think about having sex all the time.

There you have it, Ms. Miller -- this is what you've done, and you have a great deal to answer for. One might've expected a "professional" to have known better, I'd venture.