I'm not a parent, but it seems plausible. It meshes with what I remember of being a kid, certainly, and what parent friends say.

Frankly it seems ridiculous to me. It's a lot easier to control your children at home than out at a restaurant since at home you have access to a wide variety of things the children can do including watching television.

Not entirely true. Most of my meals as a kid were home-cooked. But they're not the sort of thing that would generally be considered "nice" - they were mostly repetitive, easy to make, and uninteresting. Most families I'm familiar with, including my own when I was younger, are more likely to go out to a middle-class sit-down restaurant when they want something "fancy" instead of make something ambitious at home(aside from special occasions - Christmas and Thanksgiving are both big fancy-home-cooking events in most families, Sundays in some, but days like that are comparatively rare).

I'm not referring just to cooking at home, but to a particular type of cooking - the fancy meal, not the "box of this, bag of that, and boiling water" stuff that so many families eat regularly. That does the job, but it's not the kind of awesome you were referring to when I made my original post.

I have no idea what your point is here. Is it your position that if you have children, it's not practical to work around the expense of a meal out by preparing food at home because it's hard to prepare food while there are children around?

Is it your position that the lack of instagram pictures of dinner from people with children shows that people who have children face a time shortage while preparing food at home?