Playing Kids Videos While Eating Dinner

We don’t let ours at restaurants. Never had to tell someone to turn theirs down though.

It’s never ok for videos with sound to be played at a restaurant, any restaurant. Nobody else should hear your videos, kid or not. Teach your kids not to disturb others.

If they want to play games with no sound, go for it.

I was told I was rude for asking someone to turn down the kids video. I wasn't at McDonald's.

Was the person sitting at your table?

I think it’s inappropriate to have videos for kids at the dinner table, but it would also be inappropriate for you to say something to someone else at a dinner table.

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The hell it would. If you don’t have the common decency or sense of decorum to not disturb others, you forfeit the right to be offended if someone calls you out for it. Unless you’re in your own home.

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Eh, that would just show a lack of class on the part of both of you at that point. There’s no way a video on a tablet at a table away from yours would be loud enough to genuinely disturb your dinner.

Well, I guess you weren't there. The phone was seated on the table at an angle where the volume played directly to the back of my head. It was a video with drum beats playing so the child could dance at the table. Every bit of my conversation I was trying to have with the person I was eating with was filtered through that drum beat. I was having trouble understanding what she was saying.
I will also note that the restaurant had jazz music playing lightly above us. Which means they were trying to establish an ambiance in the restaurant. And it wasn't the video that the table behind me was playing

We did it because we were not going to be that family with a child making any noise of any kind. No one could hear it.

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but it would also be inappropriate for you to say something to someone else at a dinner table.

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This type of thought is what is wrong with our country. Stop thinking you can just do whatever you want to in public and everyone around you just has to deal with it.
Unless you are paying my bill, your little nightmare is going to turn the volume on his brainwasher down.

Epic Cajun is coming across smarter than some of you rednecks who are just gonna “take matters into your own hands”.
I don’t like mine getting on the phone at dinner, but they are little and at a Mexican place I’ll allow it, since it’s loud anyways. We don’t honestly take ours to “nice” places yet bc of their age and not wanting to disturb others, but I’d never say anything if someone else had a kid there doing it. Never know, they may be on anniversary dinner and can’t afford a sitter or just can’t find one.

Same goes for airplane behavior, but that’s for another thread…

Ok. At the end of the day everything Epic Cajun is saying is correct. I have no agency over another party's behavior in a nice restaurant. I'm sympathetic to the child situation and no sitter. But if that's the case, I may need to choose to go to a more family friendly atmosphere restaurant where a phone playing music out loud is just another part of the atmosphere.

I politely mentioned the music to our young and relatively inexperienced waiter. I don't think he was intentionally ignoring us but I don't think he was comfortable with a confrontation either and thus nothing was done. But that's on the restaurant as Epic Cajun and others have said. My goal today is to reach out to the management of the restaurant and express my concerns about how it was handled and ask them how I should handle something like that in the future. I should not have approached the table to address them personally. Lesson learned.