My experience as well, kids are nicer to each other than we were in the 90s for sure.
Yeah, those poor 90’s kids were dealing with some unacknowledged or untreated intergenerational trauma, parenting, a cycle which they’ve been working on breaking. It’s really hard to have emotional regulation and not take out your feelings on someone else when you have no pre frontal cortex development, yet, and you’ve never had that exampled for you, by parents. Not having a go at you, at all, or refuting you, your statement is entirely true, they (we) were assholes at times. I just find the second half to that story hugely uplifting.
What’s this rule that only 2 kids can sit with you. And that’s on a birthday. Best case scenario for non-birthdays is you sit with one other kid, but more likely it’s eating alone.
If parents can eat with you on your birthday, it’s probably elementary school, and the kids probably typically sit with their class. If a parent shows up for a birthday lunch, they probably sit them at a separate 4-top from the whole class, so they can pick 2 other students to sit with the kid and their parent.
In my kids elementary school, we just sat at the long table with the whole class, but I could imagine that scenario if the kid/parent sat at a different table. If you didn’t specify a couple of kids and left it as a free-for-all, there would be chaos.
