“I’ve been in restaurants with monster children and enabling parents that disrupted everyone’s meal. Frankly, we have come close to telling management to either shut them up or we will leave without paying our bill.”
No matter what is done, there is no pleasing everybody. I once “dusted” my rowdy child’s pants inside a restaurant to restore order. Some busybody at the next table scolded me for corporal punishment. I shouted at her in pretty crude terms where she could go and what she could do when she got there. Her husband was too embarrassed to look at me or say a word.
To quote noted child-hater, comic W. C. Fields once said, “I like children, properly cooked.”
Or, “I like little girl children, about 18 to 20 years old.”
That is absolutely correct.
Our kid learned very early on what our standard of behavior was in restaurants. No corporal punish was required in that particular area. You behave or we leave, regardless of where we are in the meal. And you don't come back for XX period of time. When she was about 2 we got up and left Wags just after getting our food (we paid for it, not the restaurant's fault) and went home and she got a sandwich for dinner. No yelling, no spanking. She was stunned that we only asked her once to behave before leaving. Never happened again.
Pick your battles with kids, but never back down when you have to issue an ultimatum; consider the ramifications of the ultimatum carefully. Sometimes you have to suffer inconvenience in order for the kid to get the message. I paid for a dinner we didn't get. It was worth it.
My primary point in this thread was that details of the nature of the altercation, the child's behavior, and just what "special needs" represented were conspicuously absent.
That said, a man running for office in a small town ought to have had more sense than to let it escalate as it did, even if he was 100% right. Shows a serious lack of judgement for someone wanting to run one's town. I'd like to have been there and seen it firsthand.