Children in pubs ... and beer gardens.

My travels have taken me to Central Europe more often than England, and more often than not, there is a fairly clear delineation between "family friendly" and "boozer." Certainly most beer gardens one visits in a place like Bavaria includes the equivalent of a children's playground.

On children in pubs, Katharine Whitehorn (Guardian/Observer)

Historically pubs wouldn't allow children on the premises; now they have family-friendly menus and positively welcome toddlers.

Note that we speak not of 21-year-olds behaving like children. My point simply is that maturity applies to adults as well as children, in the sense of positive reinforcement. If the atmosphere is good, with beer, food, music and fun, why wouldn't we want kids to learn about it, sans the prohibitionist idiocy that inevitably colors any such discussion in the United States?

In 1985, the Augustiner in Salzburg was my first genuine German-style beer garden experience. Although I didn't mention younger children specifically in my recollection, they certainly were there, too, carving up sausages and acting as part of the scene. Why not?

But it was out in the leafy beer garden that I fell in love with a way of life, one experienced for the very first time. At midday, hundreds of beer lovers were seated at tables, shaded by towering chestnut trees, surrounded by stone walls and stucco, virtually all of them drinking malty Marzen-style lager brewed and aged only yards away.
It was entirely self-service, or so I remember. You went back inside for sausages, salads and loaves of crusty bread, and then joined the line for beer. A cashier took Austrian schillings, as plastic was not negotiable and Euros didn’t exist, and handed back a receipt. Upon choosing a liter (33.8 ounces) ceramic mug from the freshly washed public stack, you ritualistically rinsed it in a fountain of cold water, handed it and the receipt over to aproned men who were pouring the deep golden beer from a tap embedded in a wooden barrel, and prepared for nirvana.

Teens drank alongside elderly men. There were playing cards, songs for singing, chicken bones and carts filled with emptied mugs. Strangers shared tables and bought rounds. Worldwide languages were spoken. I ate, drank, used the WC, drank some more, and returned the following two nights to do it again, each time walking 25 minutes back to my lodging, feeling perfectly safe and wishing we could do the same back home.