It’s a bad look when a teenager is glued to a screen during a meal out with their parents. A pre-schooler watching Peppa Pig in a high chair at Pizza Express is hardly great parenting optics, either. I know this, and yet my children – 12, six and three – often end up watching a tablet or my phone when we go out to a restaurant. It’s a quick and easy way of making them sit still and be quiet in a public setting – yet I don’t get any brownie points from the other diners. Someone at a nearby table will inevitably tut or roll their eyes – screens in restaurants are a parenting red flag.
For instance, at a pub in Somerset during the Easter holidays, a couple in their 60s became so offended by my youngest watching an episode of PAW Patrol on my phone that they walked over to our table and berated me for “rotting his brain”.
“You should be making conversation with him,” the woman said, before adding, helpfully: “We bring books and games when we go out with our grandchildren.”
Good luck with that, I thought. We’d been on a long, cold, wet walk and the children were tired and hungry. Also, I was quite enjoying chatting to my husband and Gemma, my 12-year-old, so I didn’t mind the others being temporarily occupied. When we go out for meals it tends to be as a family – babysitters are so expensive these days. Can’t we have a few moments when we’re not entertaining the younger ones?
I feel the same when I take them out for lunch with a friend, particularly one who doesn’t have children. If the kids are watching something, we can catch up in peace. I really don’t see the harm. You could argue that it’s good manners not to let your young children dominate the meal.
I know, I know. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends that children under two should have no screen time, while those aged two to four should have no more than an hour a day.
To be clear, my children never have screens at mealtimes at home, and I’m not one of those mums who lets my toddler gawp at my phone in their buggy while stuffing their face with raisins.
I also know that there’s a time and a place for screens in restaurants; not every meal warrants them and you definitely need to give your child headphones if they’re watching something or gaming. Nothing annoys my husband more than a child on a nearby table watching something at top volume – probably because he can’t help tuning in.
We caved in to screens as the last resort. First, you try to encourage the child to sit quietly, chat, look at the menu. Then you might try colouring – many restaurants and pubs provide crayons and paper, or you’ll have brought your own kit. But as every parent knows, colouring only lasts for so long, and food can take an age to arrive – and then be too hot for little ones to eat. When faced with the choice of a child kicking off or one happily entertained by Octonauts, I know which I’d choose.
Yes, it can be difficult to get the phone away from them once you’ve given in, but I find once they start eating, they’re usually happy to focus on their food. And if they make a fuss, let’s just say I pick my battles.
My parents don’t bat an eyelid that I hand out the digital nanny in restaurants. They get it. Children are full-on and it’s not as if the other diners would tolerate them tearing around the tables.
But I know that several of my parents’ friends shudder at the thought of screens during a meal out. They’re smug to be the last generation to parent without screens; the ones who successfully navigated restaurants and long-haul flights without the luxury of Peppa Pig. “We just had to get on with it,” they shrug sanctimoniously. “Children read books, played outside or had an actual conversation.”
Sure, but during the late-1980s when I was growing up, I don’t remember eating out in restaurants that much. It wasn’t a thing like it is now, just as no one took their children on holidays to Dubai or the Maldives.
On the handful of occasions when we did go to Happy Eater (remember that?) or the local pub, it felt like a novelty. My sisters and I would be sent to the playground outside, where there would invariably be a treehouse filled with fag butts and beer cans and some derelict swings.
I reckon my children are safer watching something on an iPad at the table than I ever was unsupervised in the playground at the local pub, which was beside a busy main road and on the edge of a car park. Or sitting alone in the car, which was the other place my sisters and I were allowed to go when we were bored during a meal out. See? Eighties parenting was equally questionable.
When I see frazzled parents desperately trying to entertain their children during Saturday lunch in The Ivy, their Aperol spritzes getting knocked over and food and broken crayons scattering the floor, I think: give them a screen or go home.
Don’t believe anyone who tells you that if you start letting your children watch screens in restaurants you’ll set a habit for life.
In my experience, as a child gets older – seven, eight, nine – they’ve been in school long enough to know how to sit quietly and listen to a boring adult conversation. I’m teaching my 12-year-old, Gemma, that she must use her phone like a grown-up, which means that being on it during a family meal out in a restaurant is rude.
But if she’s been making an effort to chat, I don’t mind her picking up her phone for a while. Particularly if I’m busy talking to the adults.
I honestly don’t see why screens in restaurants have to be a parenting litmus test. All of you judging me, I challenge you to take a pre-schooler out for lunch without an iPad. It’s exhausting. You will spend the meal cleaning up and skivvying around after them. They’ll want to get down but where will they go? Enjoy walking round and round the restaurant with them. It’s a waste of time and money – you may as well stay at home.
We all love going out to a restaurant, though. When I ask my children what they want to do at the weekend, they’ll always say “go out for lunch”. I truly believe this is because my husband and I relax and let our hair down when we go out, which means everyone has a good time. If it takes an iPad to help the mood, so be it.
As told to Anna Tyzack
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