Parenting Tip of the Day: Don't fight at Chuck E. Cheese

December 11, 1:42 PMParenting ExaminerTerreece Clarke

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Chuck E. Cheese adult cage fighting?

I'm not a fan of the popular birthday party hang out. I like a little less chaos and competition at birthday parties and prefer to kick it with only the kids we invited, although they do make great pizza. But as the Wall Street Journal and several parenting bloggers report - Chuck E. Cheese is a place where a kid can be a kid and parents can act like spoiled teenaged cage fighters.

I get it, the temptation to act out weighs heavily on the minds of parents who find themselves confined to a large, noisy facility with sugar hyped kids and a creepy array of animatronics playing garage band to some of the most overplayed songs in American history. 

All you want is for little Johnny to have the most special party of his dreams - as special as you can get with 10 other kids having the same party at the same time - and some little kid is acting like a, well, kid. Kids yell, hit, steal tokens, hog games, snub other kids and when you add in sugar, blinking lights that rival any techno club and a kid's sense of entitlement, you have the makings of kiddie conflict.

That's where it should end. As a kiddie conflict. The kind in which a parent or two step in and say "Hey little guy, we share at home so we are going to share here." or "Thank you for having such nice manners and waiting your turn, let's try a different game until he's through." Places like these are where parents have to actively parent their own kids.

If you decide to just sit on the sidelines you're likely to see something you don't like. The idea that you need to straighten someone else's kid out is never a good one in these situations. If you have a problem, remove your child from the situation, move to a different game or location.

In other words - be a grown-up.

More from the Wall Street Journal Article:

This most recent assault, described in police reports, occurred after a woman in her 30s approached a 6-year-old boy who was playing a videogame. When the boy went to insert more tokens to continue playing, the woman grabbed the tokens out of his hand and told him to stop hogging the game. The boy went and got his 26-year-old mother, who walked over to the woman. The woman began screaming at the boy's mother, and another suspect, a man in his 30s, grabbed the mother by the throat and pushed her against the videogame machine. CEC employees had to pull the man off the mother. Both the man and the woman fled the scene.