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"Adults (or I should say parents, as nobody so far has identified nannys or babysitters as being problematic in this way - but of course they are getting paid to watch the children which somehow makes it different in our society, doesn't it . . .) who are too busy doing \"their own thing\" (talking to each other, using their cellphones, whatever) to supervise their children in restaurants or more often coffeehouse-type-of-places are (to my mind) the indirect subjects of two recent stories in the NYT. One is about the culture of multi-tasking that pervades our society at various levels (sometimes, maybe, this *can* be geographically sorted to a point) and another is one step further away, but speaks about the desire to succeed.  The second article focuses on young women, who still even today generally more than their young men peers, will have to struggle with whether they will be mostly a career woman or mostly someone who raises children, or whether they will get up on the high wire to do the lovely acrobatic act called \"having it all\".  We've got a lot of mixed messages going on that affect these young women. Obviously these mixed messages will ultimately affect our society at large (yes, in restaurants, that most public place where we show ourselves to the world and to each other) and will affect their own families as those families grow. It's sort of hard to have it all. Yet somehow the seed has been sown that indeed, it is possible. I wonder, myself, how possible this is for how many, ultimately. Can the best cellphone and the right shoes make life flow in some special way? This, is what it seems to me is happening, mostly, when disruptions occur with children and their adult attendees in restaurants. Kids, often enough, are just not as well loved as a cellphone and a double latte with the perfect haircut. Or maybe its not that they are not as well loved, but they sure can be more difficult to deal with. \n"
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