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Family reunions in crowded restaurants are usually happy affairs. Cousins catch up with each other. New spouses get to know one another. Memories and jokes fly. Smiles abound.

Except when a 5-year-old boy decides that he’s not having fun.

The issue: Who should discipline that child if he misbehaves? The parents only? Or can grandparents leap in?

The boy was sitting near the end of a long table. He was feeling moody and ignored, as kids often do. So he decided to turn his dinner into an Andy Warhol painting.

He poured ketchup all over it. Then he poured mustard all over the ketchup. He was about to add a few tons of salt and pepper when his grandfather noticed.

In a booming voice, Grandpa ordered the boy to stop. Then he got up, picked up the boy and the chair in which he was sitting, and moved it all the way across the room.

He set chair and boy down with a noisy kerplunk. “You’re in time out, buddy,” he announced.

Of course, the boy started crying. Of course, the entire restaurant was watching and listening (including your faithful correspondent).

And of course, the grandfather’s attempt to end the trouble only caused more of it.

The boy’s mother started in on Grandpa. “I don’t want you disciplining my son,” she said. “Only I can discipline my son.”

Grandpa said he might be your son, but he’s my grandson, and I can discipline him just as much and just as well as you can.

It looked as if we witnesses might have been about to watch a nasty family feud. But the mother and the grandfather quickly agreed to disagree.

Another woman — maybe an aunt? — soothed the boy with a hug and a piece of candy. He stopped crying, rejoined the party, and even ate a few mouthfuls of the work of art he had created on his plate.

Despite the more or less happy ending, the issue of who should discipline a child very much remains.

I’m voting strongly for parents — only.

I have no doubt that in that restaurant, Grandpa’s motives were positive. But he is not — and cannot be — the primary adult authority in his grandson’s life. That job belongs to Mom and Dad, and only to them.

By appointing himself to the Supreme Court of Discipline, Grandpa not only made the situation worse, but he undermined Mom and Dad.

What he forgot, or overlooked, is that the issue wasn’t just that one Warhol mess on that one evening. It was whether the parents have unquestioned authority in the child’s mind over the long haul. When Grandpa intervened, he invited the child to be confused, and wary of all adults.

But grandparents can also undermine the authority of parents with their default weapon: Spoiling.

Many grandparents don’t want to discipline their grandchildren at all. They trot out the cliché about the common enemy — the generation between them and the grandkids.

They are always full of chocolate before meals and overlooked bedtimes. They think their role is to be buddies to their grandchildren, and endless sources of money, gifts — and no moral judgments.

For example, even if Mom and Dad say no TV before dinner, Grandma will often turn the set on, just so she can see the little one smile.

This might seem benign. But it’s just as pernicious as what the grandfather did in that crowded restaurant.

I well remember a repeated struggle in our own family. It had to do with dessert.

We almost never eat it, and almost never served it to our kids when they were growing up.

This wasn’t some holier-than-thou crusade. We just try to shave calories where we can, and we wanted our kids to do the same.

That policy was destined for heavy weather, and it regularly found plenty via the grandparents.

But because our kids knew that Mom and Dad were Boss 1 and Boss 2, they always told their grandparents that they couldn’t have cake or ice cream without Mom’s or Dad’s permission. The grandparents learned to say OK, and various world wars were averted.

I have another bone to pick with the grandfather in the restaurant. He was right to try to solve the Warhol problem. But he missed the chance to solve it in the right way.

Instead of sentencing his attention-seeking grandson to a spot across the room, he should have walked over to the boy, put his arm around him and said:

“Is something bothering you, buddy?”

Not only would a power struggle between adults have been avoided, but the boy might respect his grandfather much more in the future.

You can’t earn respect, Grandpa, by throwing your weight around at a five-year-old as if you were a Marine drill sergeant. You can earn it by meeting a child where he is.

And you can earn the respect of the child’s parents by letting them be the only justices on the Supreme Court.

 Bob Levey is a national award-winning columnist.