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The final straw was a little girl using an iPad with the volume on high, a device her parents refused to turn down despite repeated requests from the staff at Caruso’s, an upscale Italian restaurant in Mooresville, North Carolina.

Yoshi Nunez, the restaurant’s manager, had encountered unruly kids in his restaurant before; but this time, he said, the parents were misbehaving, too.

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“Finally, we had to ask them to leave,” Nunez told The Washington Post. “They were upset, but they didn’t seem to care about what the other guests thought. We tried to be nice about the situation, but we’re here to take care of customers and we can’t tell a parent how to control their kids.

“That was the incident that triggered the entire thing.”

“The entire thing,” as Nunez puts it, is the restaurant’s strict ban on children under the age of 5. It went into effect in January, drawing passionate applause from some diners online and angry condemnation from others.