Naively, no doubt, I had rather supposed that babies and bars didn't mix. I was wrong: In Brooklyn, it seems, they do. In Park Slope, where pricey strollers dominate the streets, they can also be found in drinking establishments. One, Union Hall, caused an uproar when it banned strollers from the premises in 2008. Nearby Double Windsor has split the baby, as it were, with its rule: No babies in the bar after 5 p.m.

Of course, I can imagine what the defenders of taking babies into bars might say. What is your evidence that bars are bad for babies? Has there ever been a controlled study of the question published in the New England Journal? Is it not possible, even, that bars are good for babies' cognitive development - all that social interaction and linguistic stimulation, etc.?

The argument might continue: Bored mothers are bad for babies, and bars keep boredom at bay. Babies are too young to remember any bad language they might hear or recall any unseemly scenes they might witness. Besides, the onus of proof is on those who want to forbid, not on those who want to permit.

This is sophistical, of course. The real reason that people take babies to bars is that they do not want to admit that the existence of their offspring imposes inescapable obligations on them, and that a baby closes off some of their options. They cannot, or at least ought not to, be footloose and fancy free any more. They are not Peter Pan: They have to grow up.

But it is not only in the bars of Brooklyn that babies and young children are inappropriately to be found. An air traffic controller recently gave his young son and daughter a go at controlling the air traffic at JFK.

Splendid as this might be from the point of view of the child's brain development and hand-to-eye coordination, it is not altogether reassuring for passengers, even though this incident passed without mishap. I remember a Russian pilot who gave the control of his airliner to his son and it crashed, killing all aboard: Though it must be admitted by anyone who has flown an Aeroflot internal flight, especially in the good old days, that it didn't take a child at the controls to make disaster likely.

Some art galleries now cater to children, not in the reasonable and welcome sense of setting aside a special room for them, but by giving them puzzles and toys to play with directly under a work of art, allegedly connected in some way with that work of art.

Now everyone must be in favor of inducting children into the marvels of civilization, but surely not at the cost of turning art galleries into playgrounds, or giving them manuscripts from, say, the Pierpont Morgan Library to color in. There is a time and a place for everything, and it isn't necessarily here and now.

In fact, we are a little confused about the place we should give children and the control we should exercise over them. Sometimes we treat them as if they were already fully adult, capable of exercising proper choice over everything. I often see mothers solicitously asking their 3-year-olds what they would like to eat, which no doubt makes for a quiet life in the short-term, but in the long establishes a childish pattern of eating. Mothers of old who made their children eat their hated greens were not just sadists.

At other times, we treat the world as if it were nothing but a vast trap waiting to ensnare children. Roman legionaries seemed ill-equipped for battle by comparison with modern children going for a bike-ride.

So we veer - I almost said drunkenly - between neglect and overindulgence. We are unsure whether babies are adults or adults are babies. Especially in Brooklyn.

Originally published in the NY Daily News.