Feb 08 2009
Appropriate Restaurant Behavior?
Here’s what I find ironic:
Parents of autistic kids will spend a great deal of time teaching their kids social skills for a variety of situations. For example, when we take the kids to a restaurant, there’s always some discussion of the restaurant rules: using inside voices, staying in our seats, using utensils…It’s a good bit of work, but we do this because we want our children to be able to function in a less-than-tolerant society.
Why then can we go to a restaurant and see a group - 2 adult women and 4 children under the age of 10 - where the children wandering around the restaurant for the majority of the time they were there? They weren’t being exactly obnoxious, it just seems like life has thrown us yet another double standard. They didn’t get any funny looks (that I noticed) for wandering around tables where people were eating…standing in chairs…climbing on the fireplace…
And yet my child is the one labeled with the “problems.”
“Does that seem right to you?” ~Jubal Early, Firefly.
LOL!!! How very true! We all have problems and none of us do!