As I just reiterated in another post, "A man's home is his castle!"

(But, as the communitarians would counter, "No man is an island!")

With that in mind, this piece by Cathy Seipp really irritated me, and made me glad I don't have kids, because the undisciplined monsters among them scare the crap out of me for a variety of reasons. Cathy Seipp doesn't seem to like the monsters either. But ominously (in my view) she says it places her "in a minority."

....this willingness to speak severely to children at all - along with not always finding their behavior acceptable - has long put me in the minority among fellow urbanite moms.

....just a few weeks ago, everyone was talking (mostly approvingly) about the N.Y. Times feature on a Chicago coffee shop owner who'd posted signs warning that customers' small children were expected to use "indoor voices" and refrain from running around banging into things.

Predictably, some shocked parents are now boycotting the shop. (The money quote from one: "What are we supposed to do, not enjoy ourselves at a café?" Yes, yes! If you can't control your kids, that's exactly what you're supposed to do!) Not so predictably, there was an outpouring of support for the coffee shop owner on the Times letters page a few days later, with one suggesting he be nominated for the Nobel Prize.

The reason I get so ticked off about this is that in the case of children, my natural libertarian impulses collide head-on with the inherent reality of a system where your children are not your own, but are part of a vast, interlocking communitarian network of other children, teachers, day care workers, Child Protective Services, and nosy busybody parents of other children. Unless you are willing to really drop out of society, you just can't raise kids out on the prairie somewhere where they'll be truly yours, and free from unwanted outside influences. It seems that it would be hard enough to raise kids without having to "be in a minority" like Cathy Seipp. She's very brave to attempt such a thing. I don't think I could do it without major problems.

I mean, it's fine for a crank like me to condemn people who can't ignore outside influences, and slam them for being a bunch of sheep who mindlessly follow a culture of monkey-see monkey-do. And I'm quite fond of exclaiming things like "Hey, if you don't like Howard Stern, turn off the goddamn radio!"

As it happens, I do like Howard Stern. But if I didn't like him and my kid turned him on, it wouldn't be quite as simple. I'd have to throw some kind of fit, and get all agitated. And even then, it would be very, very tough to stop the kid from listening. Radios, televisions, magazines, and the Internet are universal.

And so are other children. If I don't like brats whose parents let them run around emitting high decibel shrieks, putting their slimy little paws in restaurant sugar bowls, and hassling total strangers, it's real easy for me to not patronize places that let children in, and condemn the parents of undisciplined brats.

But what if I had a kid? Eventually, it would be required by the state to go to school somewhere, and escaping other people's undisciplined brats wouldn't be so easy. Hell, reality being the way it is, they might even end up invading my house, under cover of "friendship" with my own child! That's a nightmarish situation to contemplate, as I'd then be forced to go ballistic at someone else's kids.

If I got arrested, would the ACLU take my case?

And suppose I decided that no undisciplined brats would ever enter my home. Even that wouldn't avoid possible contamination, as my child might end up visiting the home which created the problem, and on top of all that the busybody parents of the undisciplined brats might start asking all kinds of nosy questions about who I voted for in the last election and why I owned pit bulls and had over a dozen guns in the house.... and despite my attempts at avoiding other people's undisciplined children I'd still end up being visited by the Child Police.

Again, where's the ACLU?

It's given me comfort to think in terms of a wall of separation between libertarianism and communitarianism. It's a nice dividing line, and it simplifies analysis.

Am I just being paranoid, or do children -- particularly "other people's children" -- breach the wall?

MORE: It's probably fair to point out that my fear of undisciplined brats might stem from my having been attacked by children at the age of two. I don't buy into the popular myth that children are innocent.

Also (as I've discussed) the tension between libertarianism and communitarianism will always reminds me of my childless libertarian neighbors, who have been told that their views would change if they had children. (I guess libertarians with views like mine should go colonize space.)