Julie Jay: Want to finish your dinner when eating out with kids? Screens are often the answer

Irish Examiner

15-07-2025

As an elder millennial, my only true religion is brunch. I love nothing more than paying €15 for eggs on toast and pretending to be impressed with a fancy flat-white when I am secretly as happy at home with my instant stuff.
This coffee will be consumed from a mug with so many chips that it is effectively a petri dish at this point.
Such is my grá for eating out that I have spent the guts of a mortgage deposit on hipster cafés down through the years. I will most certainly be the old woman who lived in a choux pastry.
Sadly, though, my eating out has been seriously curtailed by the arrival of children, because it always ends in mayhem.
From the outset, let me just say that I don't blame my kids for their inability to sit through a dinner in a restaurant. Because we don't do it often, I have yet to perfect a formula that will see us all eating a meal in peace, and because I lack the confidence in a happy outcome, we don't do it. However, when we attempt to dine out, the problem is only made worse by their lack of experience, and so the cycle continues until the children are old enough to vote.
I have no shame in admitting that before having kids, I would silently judge parents who tucked into their meal while their child was immersed in an iPad. Now, I totally get it.
The truth is, the screens are often a necessary tool in facilitating everyone being able to swallow their dinner without risking an unchewed vol-au-vent getting lodged in a parent's oesophagus.
Of course, meals in restaurants and pubs have been attempted previously to this summer, but due to us being away from home the last couple of weeks, never have we been forced to use cutlery that wasn't our own with such frequency.
With Number One full of beans and Number Two in the full throes of toddlerdom, meals out have been even more chaotic than usual. Most attempts at dining in restaurants end in me feeling utterly defeated and over-tipping to the point of near personal bankruptcy to compensate for having had to run around after a two-year-old or chase my four-year-old around the hotel foyer.
It doesn't help that the kids' menu offers only plain pasta with a side of plain pasta.
At home, Number One loves cheese, vegetables, and sauce, but when out and about, you'd be forgiven for thinking that he believes a 'pea' is just something you do in a bathroom after a big drink.
It was ever so slightly disappointing watching other kids tuck into adventurous things from the adults' menu like tofu curry and deep-fried Camembert. At the same time, Number One voiced his disgust at his pasta arriving in the wrong shape (apparently, penne is your only man).
Number Two, thankfully, gobbles up anything placed in front of him, specifically what Number One refuses.
Unfortunately, he is also at that stage where he considers himself too big for the high chair but too small to attend a Junior Cert disco — an awkward phase that will last only another 12 years and has resulted in him sitting on my lap for most meals.
This was fine, save for the fact he also proceeded to scoff most of my dinner, which is just as well, as it is never too late for Mammy to get a summer body.
At every meal out, the two boys flanked me, and my head was going from left to right as if I were a celebrity spectator at a Wimbledon semi-final, with similar bewilderment as to what exactly was going on.
On multiple occasions, Number One disappeared under the table as if he were anticipating an earthquake, with me eventually deciding to leave him down there for the duration of the meal, because nothing says 100% Irish like offering a slew of payoffs for good behaviour under the table (literally).
Like most things, the more you do it, the better you get at it. I've tried everything to get the kids to sit quietly for a meal, from colouring to cars and games, but I've no choice but to accept that screens are a must for meals out.
The iPads have been ordered so yesterday's disastrous breakfast in Mayo will hopefully be avoided in future.
(To the waiter who served us, I'm sure we have made you question why you didn't say no to the summer job and head off to San Diego with the rest of your mates, and for that I can only apologise, and over-tip.)
It feels like a failure, somehow, to accept that we need iPads to make it through dinner, but quite frankly, I am too defeated to care.
This week, I voiced my concern to my mother, telling her how inept I felt in restaurants when the kids started to kick off and how my main course was stone cold by the time I got round to eating it. She insisted that anytime we were brought anywhere, as kids, we were impeccably behaved.
It's even more evidence, as if needed, that as parents, we have a unique ability to repress memories and replace them with unicorns and marshmallows as the years go by.
Which is why, when my own children are grown and ask how they behaved in restaurants, I will be giving them a five-star review all the way, and over-tipping waiters in the interim to buy their silence.