A tricky subject that’s come up a few times in my local Fb food groups. A brewery here had allowed ‘unrestricted’ access for kids of all ages… until the younger ones started tearing out landscaping elements and generally creating havoc.
Updated rules allow children until early evening.
Interestingly enough, most beer gardens in Berlin allow kids, with one of our all-time favorites even including a play area with a sandbox and a swing.
It all goes back to the parents not parenting. C’mon - parents Emailed a complaint to an owner when their child crawled under a fence and wound up in the parking lot? As that owner said “I built a beer garden; not Guantanamo.”
It’s a HUGE safety factor for servers if kids are running around the aisles while servers are carrying trays of beer or food and a kid runs into one of them, dropping heavy glasses of beer or plates of food on the kid. And then the parent sues the establishment, because they weren’t doing their job of parenting? You can’t expect beer halls to all have an enclosed “play area” for the kids to be in while the parents drink.
Bad apples spoil it for the rest of the families whose children actually behave properly in public.
I thought this was hilarious:
“Kids are the only category where we very openly, very publicly discriminate,” said Aurore Stanek-Griffiths, a 39-year-old parent in Red Hook, N.Y. “If I tell you I run a business and during certain hours people over age 50 aren’t allowed, you would be like, ‘Why?!’”
Dunno… do 50 yr olds climb trees, or mess with landscaping, or require a portable potty? 
Many more breweries still choose to cater to families with young children by offering play areas or even building playgrounds. At Almanac Adventureland in Alameda, Calif., parents will find sandboxes, bouncy houses, arcades, a large lawn with games and more. The company, previously called Almanac Beer Company, rebranded as part of its kid-friendly expansion.
Taking their cue from what we do in the fatherland 
I think a general lack of parenting awareness is becoming more prevalent. Children who aren’t being engaged properly by their caring adult leads to misbehaviour. In public spaces this can lead to problems. One of the huge issues is exposure of children to screens from a very young age. Adults don’t seem to want to look after kids anymore - they let screens do the job of parenting. I don’t work in a brewery, but my department of neonatal intensive care has made a huge effort to be a family-friendly space and welcoming to the siblings of sick babies. But we get parents not minding their energetic toddlers, who run off and push buttons of important equipment, scream, run into nurses trying to do delicate tasks for sick babies, run and touch other babies and make other parents angry. Once I politely told a father he needed to mind his 4 year old who was running around the room of unwell babies and taking toys from the personal area of a baby who had a serious multiresistant bug (I didn’t say the baby had a multiresistant bug, I just emphasised that touching toys belonging to a different baby was not good for infection control and now we would have to clean the toys and his child should wash their hands). The dad became quite angry with me and asked why I had kept toys in the room if his child couldn’t play with them! FFS this is a hospital, not a play area! I told him that in more polite terms and that it was not right if his child was entering what was clearly another baby’s bed space and grabbing toys that clearly belonged to that baby. What has the world come to if doctors have to waste time policing parents and their kids instead of concentrating on looking after sick babies. Jeez. This is a pet peeve, you can probably tell!
The article is specifically about breweries, but based on the comments here, which I totally agree with, kids shouldn’t be allowed in any restaurant or place where adults are enjoying the quiet. If a restaurant has a playground, I’ll avoid it. Is there a way we can keep poorly-parented kids off of airplanes too?
Kids are people, too, ya know?
I think it’s in the Silliness thread here but loved the pic of the sidewalk blk board that said “Unattended children will be given sugar & taught to swear!”
Completely disagree, kids should be exposed as early as possible to environments like restaurants, theaters as possible but it is the parents responsibility to teach them how to behave (and in my opinion without any help of electronics). In addition, especially in the US often adults are an equally big “problem” and don’t know how to behave - in the few weeks now back in Europe it was always easy to point out the table with American tourists - why do Americans talk so loud in public places like restaurants)
Is there a way we can keep poorly-parented kids off of airplanes too?
Remove the parents, of course. A proved rule of thumb is that looking at the kid tells volumes about its parents and home.
I agree the first part of your response but the problem I encounter most often is parents who think that their responsibility ends when they hand the kid a phone and he watches a video with full sound on. If parents won’t be responsible then the only recourse is to ban kids under xx age.
I used to think that Americans are the worst, and maybe the tourists are, but for 20 years I’ve lived in an Asian city with a multinational expat community and the American expats are no worse than several other nationalities. I’ll agree with you that most Europeans are quieter.
I have to say that I haven’t seen it in years that any kid listen with the sound on (independent of age) but that they all have headphones
Again, I disagree - to change anything you can’t go the “easy” way to just impact the kids. If you want to have a change you would have to allow kids in any restaurant but have some kind of “punishment” for the parents if their kids don’t behave. (I know that wouldn’t be an easy path for any restaurant but I don’t like the idea to “punish” the kids for mistakesof their parents
Hey you kids get off my lawn…er…beer garden.
Frankly who cares if the parents get ripped and the children run around and act like monsters. Oh right…in a public space with liability.
Only thing I can add is the child friendly attitude is a business move. Less drinking so do a two-fer, to draw in parents because those old fart boomers aren’t doing their part and getting hammered any longer.
BTW, seems like the entitlement set to let your kids run crazy. I encounter it. My reaction is to smile at the kids, unless they’re really monsters, but mostly just give the ‘rents a stink eye. They never get it. Maybe not enough sleep or that mortgage makes you numb.
Have a nice day y’all…minor shit in context to current events.
My parents took me to restaurants from an early age (sitting on phone books or a booster seat at the table. Granted, it was before the advent of electricity, let alone screens, but I don’t recall that I was ever reprimanded for bad behavior. I knew how to act from example. And I looked forward to the excursions. I guess my parents did something right, because they weren’t punitive at all. I just always enjoyed being allowed to be with the grownups. They were … interesting. So was the food.
It does come down to the example parents set. I also went to restaurants with my parents as a kid, and they always made it clear what was expected of me. It wasn’t about being punitive, but more about making the experience enjoyable for everyone. I think that sense of responsibility makes different kids pick up on that kind of guidance.
I was in many bars from a very young age, and not pretty pubs; rather, industrial dives that catered to men coming in at 6:00am to slap back some beers and shots before work. Learned a lot, but I shut up, because I was so interested in what they were all talking about. Mt aunt ran such a bar, and I minded my Ps and Qs.
I find what used to be common expectations of parenthood are the expectations of my super parents now. Got great ones in my district and many of them; so, the weaker parents, I hope, feel some pressure to improve. They miss that bus. Their kids can range from horrendous to wonderful; but the problem is that it’s all by chance.
I think a mistake I often see from the alcohol perspective is that the parents go to one place and get pissed up while the kids play elsewhere. I think it is a lesson in moderation to have your kids around you when you consume, so they witness responsible imbibation and the resulting positive social interactions. Soon or later, the bad boys of the beer garden will come to the conclusion that their parents aren’t quite up to snuff in the broader scheme (usually age 12-13) and they are open to guidance on how to conduct themselves in a crowd, without ruining it for everyone else. Can’t blame the business for CYA, though.
There’s a brewery in San Francisco that opened a few years back in a large space in a kid heavy neighborhood. They have a ping pong table, shuffle board, and a sort of adjoined room with bean bags, jenga, board games etc… Quickly the place became heavy with parents and young kids early in the evening. Then there was online grumbling about all the rug rats, so they implemented a policy to kick kids out at a certain hour - maybe 8 or 9, I forget exactly. Seems like a reasonable compromise. The brewery got a ton of business early in the evening that they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten without letting kids in, but didn’t want to alienate the adults (which in this case were mostly 20 something tech workers).
The local brewery with the nicest beer garden has a similar policy. Nobody under 21 after 8 or 8:30pm.
Perfect happy medium.
