The restaurant hired armed security guards following a series of conflicts in 2003, but an incident involving an overzealous security guard early last year prompted the town of Brookfield to ask Chuck E. Cheese’s to remove the weapons from their guards. Private security officers still service the restaurant during busy periods.

These fights aren’t between kids who bumped heads in the climbing tunnels either. Rather, the confrontations are a favorite pastime of adults at the restaurant, likely caused by a combination of overcrowding, earsplitting noise, stress and yes, alcohol.

The root causes for the restaurant’s continuing problems are not entirely definitive. But generating a list of possibilities is not so difficult.

First of all, can somebody tell me why a children’s pizza restaurant and arcade requires a liquor license? If ever the term "recipe for disaster" applied, this would be a fitting application of the phrase. Is this a place where kids can be kids, as Chuck E. Cheese’s marketing directly suggests? Or is this a place for adults to be adults? Is it possible to imagine a kid’s play area at the back of a roadhouse on a Saturday night? How about holding a rave with live bands at a day care center, to help stressed-out parents to take the edge off a busy day?

The town of Brookfield should give serious consideration to pulling the restaurant’s liquor license. A Chuck E. Cheese’s location on the south side of Milwaukee voluntarily stopped serving alcohol in early 2007, and that location has experienced a subsequent drop in violent incidents.

Mixing potentially hundreds of screaming kids, robotic fuzzy characters singing mind-numbing songs on stage, and too many frosty cold ones quickly lead to parents who all too willingly check out of the situation. Not that I can blame them.

The vision of checked-out parents leads me to root cause number two. As a parent of two children who love Chuck E. Cheese’s, I have some words of advice for other unfortunate souls who share my parental plight. Commit to the experience, and enjoy the games alongside your kids. This experience can be a nightmare on a busy day, and most of the other parents will be ignoring their kids from afar, gorging themselves on pizza and beer. You will feel like the lone civilized being on an island of cannibals, and you will be asked for free tokens from just about every unsupervised child who can catch your eye. But on the ride home, you will feel like a superhero, and deservedly so.

Third, take steps in advance to avoid the most stressful situation of the entire visit - the dreaded ticket exchange. Standing at the understaffed exchange counter, while unsupervised kids push and shove for visibility is bad enough. Negotiating with the teenage employees to determine exactly how many pieces of Laffy Taffy can be purchased with a huge string of game-produced tickets can be a life-altering experience, even for an adult. Next time, try buying an entire bag of candy from the store (sugar free is best), and bring it along in the car. When the time comes to turn in the game tickets, encourage the kids to save them up for a bigger prize during the next visit. When the whining begins, offer a truce of an entire bag of candy waiting in the car. Plus, they’ll eventually lose the tickets before your next visit. It’s a win, win situation. It’s also brilliant, and it works.

Root cause number four belongs to the restaurant itself. Wouldn’t you think that the hiring process at a Chuck E. Cheese’s would involve a fairly simple screening process? Question one: "Do you like kids?" If the answer is no, thanks for coming, but we’ll hire someone else. The restaurant could score a lot of points with parents by making staffing decisions like a school district. Instead of hiring teenagers who don’t want to be there, the restaurant should focus their hiring efforts on moms and dads in their 20s and 30s, who can help kids with the games, break up disputes and put on a gym teacher hat for a few hours. This might involve paying a higher hourly wage, but it would certainly lead to happier customers.

Local officials, parents, restaurant management and employees can work together to make Chuck E. Cheese’s a more enjoyable place to visit. Please, for my own sanity, make this happen.