I reproduce this exchange in its entirety from slate.com’s “Care and Feeding” advice column:

Dear Care and Feeding,

My wife and I and our 4-year-old son were out to dinner last week. It was a medium-nice restaurant, not fast food, but not super fancy either. My son is a normal, active little boy, and it’s hard for him to sit through a whole dinner, so we let him explore the restaurant a little. I noticed our waitress giving him the hairy eyeball, so we asked him to stop running. He was pretty good about it after that, but he did get underfoot when she was carrying a tray, and she spoke to him pretty sharply to go back to our table and sit down. I felt it was completely uncalled for, and she should have come and spoken to us personally instead of disciplining someone else’s child.

I tipped 5 percent and spoke briefly to her manager, who gave noncommittal replies. My wife agrees with me, but when we posted about it on Facebook, we got a lot of judgy responses.

—It’s Hard for a 4-Year-Old to Sit Still

Dear Sit Still,

Yeah, this is your fault. It’s hugely your fault. Of course it’s hard for a 4-year-old to sit still, which is why people usually stick to fast-dining establishments while working on restaurant manners. It’s why one parent usually responds to a fidgety kid who wants to “explore” by taking him outside the restaurant, where he can get his wiggles out while not taking laps around servers precariously carrying trays of (often extremely hot) food and drink.

A kid “exploring” a restaurant is not a thing. When you did intervene, it wasn’t to get him back in his seat. It was just to instruct him to “stop running.” You weren’t parenting, so a server did it for you. She was right. You were wrong.

Your son is not ready to eat at a “medium-nice” restaurant again until he is capable of behaving a little better. You can practice at home. You can practice at McDonald’s. You can try a real restaurant again with the understanding that one of you may need to take him out when he starts getting the urge to run an obstacle course.

I doubt that you will do this, but I encourage you to return the restaurant, apologize to the manager for complaining about your server, and leave her a proper tip.

Mend your wicked ways.

Probably not the answer the proud papa was looking for. I was present during a similar episode over brunch at a courtyard restaurant in Oakland circa late 1985. A married couple, old friends, brought their toddler with them from Southern California to visit us. At table, the little beast took loud exception after a while to being confined to a high chair, and began tossing cutlery around the area. At one point she seized a stemmed drinking glass and would have hurled it to the brick floor had not my wife pried it loose from the infant’s chubby fingers and, glaring at the mother, observed through gritted teeth that as local residents we would like to dine at the establishment again one day.

The father then released his princess from her confinement, whereupon she wandered freely around the courtyard, tugging at other diners’ sleeves with her grubby hands, and drawing not a few glares, which didn’t escape the notice of my pal. “I don’t know what’s wrong with people,” he huffed in a rather louder than conversational tone “when they’ve got a problem with a cute little baby girl.”

After they left on Monday, the wife growled to me “If you ever invite them back, I’ll divorce you” (Reader: I didn’t; she divorced me anyway).

The child’s thirty-five now, has an offspring of her own, and, while still a little overly doting in this non-parent’s opinion, doesn’t take that kind of shit from the kid.

cordially,