For us, the funny thing is, my 7 year old autistic son is the easy one to take out to eat, travel with, and gets all kinds of compliments since he was a baby about how well mannered he is. My 3 year old NT son is the one who has a difficult time in the restaurants and when traveling!

Recently, when I took the boys by myself to ride the trains and then to one of our favorite family restaurants, I realized they were overtired, overstimulated and very hungry, but they wanted to go, begged to go, so I tried it. I ordered and my younger son started acting up. I didn’t hesitate to ask them to box up everything when he wouldn’t calm down right away. I would have done the same thing had it been my older son.

Just wanted to clarify my comment above “But do we take them out or bail at the first sign of impending trouble? No, otherwise how are they ever going to learn?”

You say that they’ll learn that they’re going to be removed if they act up and that’s exactly my point. You assume that’s a “negative” to the child, and for yours it apparently is. However, if the reason they’re behaving inappropriately is b/c they are overstimulated (which despite our best efforts to avoid, sometimes still happens) and they WANT to leave, then taking them out immediately is only going to reinforce the behavior. That’s what I meant.

That said, I know the “behavior” is their way of communicating when they’ve had enough so at the risk of reinforcing it we do respond pretty quickly so that they know we understood what they needed and so we don’t create a scene. And b/c giving them a few minutes to chill out can go a long way toward avoiding any worse “behavior.”

“But do we take them out or bail at the first sign of impending trouble? No, otherwise how are they ever going to learn?”
They learn that when they start behaving a certain way, they’re removed–what else are they supposed to learn? Kids, regardless of their developmental status, learn very quickly exactly how much time they have before the hammer comes down. If you give them 20 seconds, they’ll take 20 seconds. We don’t zip them out of there when storm clouds gather…we are masters at distraction and deflection at this point…but as I said, if that fails within about 10 seconds, we go outside. I have a VERY low tolerance for disrupting other people’s enjoyment of their time in a restaurant. I know I want mine to be pleasurable, and I respect that for others. On a plane, there’s not much choice, although again…we always fly as prepared as we can be.

It took us years to get to a point where we could have a relatively calm meal at a restaurant with our twins. We still make it a point to go to the same places each time (somewhere familiar and family-friendly), at off-times when it’s not busy, we bring lots of things to keep the boys busy, and we tip well . But we never could have gotten to this point had we just stayed home and not tried all those years. We’re kind of back to square one now w/ our youngest also on the spectrum and he has difficulty w/ restaurants.

We do take our kids out if they get too rowdy / loud or are crying or having a fit, and we are always prepared to leave early if needed. But do we take them out or bail at the first sign of impending trouble? No, otherwise how are they ever going to learn? We make an effort to calm them at our table first. If we can’t get them calm in a reasonable time (we don’t wait long, we are mindful of others trying to enjoy their meal), then we take them out. When they’re calm, we bring them back in. Sometimes we have to do this several times. Sometimes we have to ask the restaurant to box up our food so we can leave. Sometimes we can tell the boys are too antsy to handle it and we stay home or get takeout to eat in the car (if we’re not at home).

The thing is, I’m pretty sure most other parents do the same things, so the accusation that we’re all just sitting there “letting them” run wild or cry and not trying to keep them calm is ridiculous. But it’s not a matter of just snapping our fingers. People who are so judgmental wouldn’t last a day in our shoes. Heck, they wouldn’t last a day in our kids’ shoes.

I am trying to think of a positive lesson out of this, with CS Wyatt’s point particularly in mind. This might sound odd, but it would be important if the family could return to the restaurant and have a (fairly) peaceful time of it. Too often we’ve just had to cross places after Charlie had a tough time and I felt if we could have gone back, if we’d felt safe at going back, something could be learned by everyone.