Tyke Tirade

One more piece of old business before I go off the clock. Reader Paul Wilbert sends in this story about the "War On Brats" that caused a big stink in The New York Times a few weeks back. Apparently there's culture war going on in coffee shops between owners and parents who want to bring along their kids, with an increasing number of establishments putting up signs that order kids to behave and use "inside voices."

The policy issue seems pretty straightforward: The owner can make whatever rules he or she wants to make, and customers can like it or lump it. The personality issue is less clear: The owner of "A Taste of Heaven," the article's anecdotal set piece, sounds like a real new-age jackass who condemns mothers as "former cheerleaders and beauty queens" but then launches into a lecture about how we all have to "send out positive energy" so that "positive energy" will come back to us. (And what's up with "inside voices," anyway? There's a phrase that makes my flesh creep.) The cafe employees sound like the usual bunch of shrill, temperamental losers you find taking a break from their careers composing electronica to work in coffee shops. And the mothers sound like, well, a bunch of former cheerleaders and beauty queens raising up a new generation of overparented monsters—could anything be more boring for a kid than to have to sit in a friggin' coffee shoppe with your parents?

Jodi Wilgoren sees this as another fight between parents and the childless. I see it as a product of the weird new fad for tomblike silence in coffee shops, where the only sound you're supposed to make is the clicking on the keyboard of your laptop. Every day I see people in coffee shops giving dirty looks to cell phone users or loud tourists. Since when have coffee shops become places where you're not supposed to make noise? And if they want quiet, why not can the horrible Latin jazz they always seem to play in those joints?