‘No one’s watching this little boy’: Waitress sees parents come into her restaurant. Then she calls them out for this all-too-common habit
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Restaurant staff have seen it all, but some customers can take an ordinary shift and turn into a more chaotic situation than previously imagined. One worker is going viral for calling out a table that left their child unattended while sitting at a bar, which led to a nightmare slip-and-fall situation.
‘It's my job to maintain a safe environment for everyone'
In a video posted this year that has more than 667,000 views, hospitality worker Kellie (@ambryrae on TikTok) shared a true story of a stressful situation caused by a parent.
“One time, these two ladies came in with a little boy, looking for a table for three … The wait was going to be about 45 minutes,” Kellie said in her video. “They didn't really want to wait and they asked the hostess if they could just sit at the bar. The hostess says no because we don't allow children at the bar. Of course, they start going back and forth with the hostess.”
Kellie said “they ended up staying anyway.” They decided to leave the little boy alone in the restaurant lobby.
“No one's watching this little boy, so of course he gets up and he starts wandering around the restaurant,” Kellie said. “The host takes him to his mom and said, ‘Hey, listen, the baby was walking around the restaurant.' She's mad because now she has to put the booze down to actually parent her child. So she grips him up and tells him to ‘Stay right there and don't move.'”
Kellie sees the boy wandering the business
The little boy didn't listen. Kellie said she later came out of the kitchen and saw with the child “twirling around in front of the kitchen doors.” So she took him by the hand and brought him back to his mother. She was displeased by this turn of events.
“She turns around and she goes, ‘I don't need y'all to keep bringing him over here every time he walks off somewhere,'” Kellie said. “‘It's just a restaurant. Like, there's not many places he can go. I know where he at.' So I go, ‘No, you do need that because he keeps walking around unsupervised in a busy restaurant and he could potentially hurt himself … It's a restaurant. Hot food, glassware, strangers—literally anything could happen.'”
The situation escalates
Kellie said the mother started “getting a little spicy” and giving her attitude, but Kellie just assured her that it was her “job to maintain a safe environment for everyone.” The pair of women ended up grumpily leaving the bar and waiting in the lobby with the boy until their table was ready, but things only got worse from there.
“About an hour later, we get a 911 call on the walkie for a manager to come over to the 90 section for a slip and fall,” Kellie said. “I get over there, and the little boy is on the floor kicking and screaming, and the mom is kneeling right next to him, and she's cursing and going off so the whole scene is just loud and chaotic. I'm trying to talk to the mom, but the theatrics are in full effect. She's putting on the whole show.”
The incident
Apparently, the child had “kept running back and forth through the aisle and fell on top of a caution sign.” He ended up “smashing his little fingers.” Kellie retrieved an ice pack for the boy, but the mother started “cursing [her] out.”
“She's telling me that she's going to sue us and get the restaurant shut down because we had the caution sign in the middle of the floor, and had we not had it there, then he would have never fallen,” Kellie said. “She's also telling me that I didn't care about her son because when I went over there, I didn't even ask if he was OK.”
Kellie defended herself, but the mother ended up calling and emailing HR. That “opened up a whole investigation.” This was quite the headache, as amidst all the madness, Kellie had missed one thing.
“[My restaurant has] this thing that no matter what goes wrong, we are to either comp the meal or offer a gift card, no matter what happens,” Kellie said. “And so because I didn't do either of those things, then it made it seem like I didn't really handle the situation correctly. So we had to look at incident reports. We had to take witness statements. We had to look at camera footage, and thank God everything backed up. Everything that I said happened because otherwise they probably would have tried to get rid of me for it.”
Is it bad parenting to let your child roam around unsupervised?
Kellie made her opinion on unsupervised children in restaurants quite clear. The presence of “hot food, glassware,” and “strangers,” Kellie said, might be a compelling enough argument to keep an eye on children in those environments. But do other people share her stance?
The internet is littered with posts of people taking to forums like Reddit and Quora to vent about parents refusing to keep an eye on their kids in public spaces, especially restaurants. One mother, after being asked to “please keep [her] child at [her] table,” even asked r/toddlers whether it was acceptable “to let your toddler walk around outdoor seating at a restaurant.”
In contrast, one opinion piece by Slate‘s Lucy Huber shares an alternate perspective. Titled “I Let My Little Kids Run Wild in Public. Join Me,” Huber asserted that “We've all gotten a little bit too afraid to let children be children.” While not specifically about restaurants, she did admit, “Yes, even at restaurants, I let them get up and roam around a bit. They've tried to get into the kitchen only, like, once.”
Buzz News has reached out to Kellie via TikTok comment.
@ambryrae It's literally NO reason for yall to be letting yall kids run amok in public spaces, yet yall do it all the time. DISHONOR on you AND your cow….
