She Kicked An Autistic Kid Out Of Her Restaurant Over Their Bad Behavior
This 55-year-old woman named Gina lives in upstate New York and runs a family-owned pizza place. She and her husband have both been working in the service industry for decades on end, however in the last couple of years, they’ve been alarmed at how rude customers are.
Not only that, but they find that kids behave worse lately, and people in general are just so entitled. They have a rule in their restaurant prohibiting customers from playing music without headphones or talking on speaker phone. It’s not a crazy request, and it’s not something they had to address with customers prior to the pandemic.
“But now it seems parents feel attacked if their children cannot watch Bluey on volume. We have signs up asking people not to do this and we actually do enforce this rule (politely but firmly),” Gina explained.
“A few weeks ago, a woman was sitting with her 9-year-old son who was watching cartoons on his tablet at full volume, while also scrolling TikTok on a phone. I nicely explained to the woman that we do not allow this, as it is disruptive to other customers and asked her to please turn off the volume.”
“The woman rudely replied that her son has both ADHD and autism so he needs to do this in order to sit down without making a fuss. I asked if she could please use headphones and she snapped that her son does not like to use them.”
Gina didn’t budge and informed this mom that it was unacceptable for her son to break their rule, so he had to put his device on silent mode or put headphones on.
Ten minutes later, while Gina was in the kitchen, she heard banging sounds coming from their dining room. She rushed over and saw the autistic child slamming his fists on the table in fury while the mom sat in her seat ignoring her son.
She asked the mom to please get her son to stop what he was doing, and the mom responded that he normally acts like this since he has autism, and he needs his device to keep calm.
Next, the boy jumped up from his seat, ran through the restaurant, and started kicking and punching chairs and tables, which fell over.
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Another one of the customers in the room screamed at the mom to get her kid under control or they would. The mom still did nothing.
“She launched into a what sounded like a pre rehearsed monologue about how autistic children deserve to occupy the same spaces as everyone else. I agree with this, but everyone still needs to behave appropriately,” she added.
“I told the woman that if she could not get her son’s behavior under control that she needs to leave. She was furious and stared yelling about how it is illegal to discriminate against people who are on the spectrum and that she would report me.”
“My husband came out, put her food into a to-go box and just said to her, ‘Get out right now!’ She looked genuinely shocked and said that kids should not be expected to just sit quietly and that the world needs to be more accepting of those who are different.”
Gina adores kids, and she raised five of her own alongside her husband. Every single child of hers has special needs, but she doesn’t think that gives them a free pass to behave poorly.
She feels that if your child has problems that severely impact their ability to conduct themselves appropriately in public, perhaps you shouldn’t take them out to a restaurant at all.
Gina is sick and tired of parents enabling their awful offspring. She doesn’t think that what happened has anything to do with autism.
“This is about entitlement, bad parenting and bad behavior as a result. Am I the [jerk]?” she wondered.
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