You’re at a restaurant, and the table next to yours has two preteens. The adults are busy chatting away. The kids are silently, separately playing on iPads. Food arrives. Parents try to take away ipads, but they give in to the whining quickly, and the kids get their way. Their food is ignored.

Or you’re on a plane. The three year old behind you keeps kicking the back of your chair. You ask him to stop, but he does it anyway. You glare at the mum for not doing anything. She’s buried in a sudoku, too absorbed to care.

Or you read about the child who died because somehow her parent forgot her in a hot car.

What spoilt kids, you think. What shit parents, you think. If I were the parent, I would be so much better. I would always be attentive, supportive, kind. I would feed him only the healthiest food, clothe him in the comfiest shirts, and my living room would always be childproof. My child would never come to any harm.

Yeah, and only shit parents would do any less, right?

It’s very easy to judge… I do it too.

I hear about mums that elect to go back to work as early as a month after giving birth and I think, wow, what a workaholic mother who doesn’t want to spend more time with her baby! But there’s a myriad reasons why a woman chooses to go back to work. Some women enjoy motherhood; others enjoy their work more, and perhaps yearn for the days when we’re no longer just a food source. Or women who choose not to breastfeed — but but but, I say, breast is best! Yes, it is, but formula isn’t going to kill the baby. I was raised on formula myself. It doesn’t really matter the reason (and there are many possible reasons). As long as the baby is thriving, kudos to the parents.

It’s easy to think, or even make pledges like, I’ll only give the very best to my child, but in reality, you’ll probably let her gum your car keys even though you KNOW they’re disgusting; you’ll probably feed her some greasy, too-sweet snack once in a while; and you might even grab her with more force than is warranted by the situation. (Paraphrased from reddit wisdom.) That’s just the way life is. Nobody’s perfect. The vast majority of us were raised like that, and we’re pretty OK people. We are all pretty decent, and we all have our faults. Nobody’s perfect.

Everyone seems to have a strong opinion about parenting, perhaps because it’s one of those things we’ve all thought about since early childhood — “when I grow up, we would be allowed eat as much ice-cream as we want!” Those who have children of their own, or have “been around children all their lives,” or are childless and/or have no plans to have children. All of them. All of us. Different ways of judging, but judgmental all the same. It’s difficult to talk about breastfeeding, sleeping, parenting, even birthing decisions without someone else chiming in with, well, I would do this, but I wouldn’t do that, well and that just sounds stupid.

Don’t get me wrong — there are things that fall squarely in the “harmful” categories, such as leaving sharp objects/household cleaners lying around and leaving your child in the car on a hot day. But it doesn’t always mean that the parent is shit. Accidents happen. Often they don’t end tragically, but sometimes they do and we read about it in the paper. And there are violent, abusive parents who routinely put their children (and often others) in harm’s way. That’s really not good.

The parent should take full responsibility for the stuff that they’ve done, and at least partially for their children as well, depending on the situation. I’m not saying they shouldn’t. But they don’t need us calling them names or making snide comments about it.

And really I meant to talk about things that aren’t so black and white, like letting the kids play with an iPad just to shut him up at a nice dinner out, or giving up completely while he harasses a stranger because it’s been a really, really long day, or being absentminded because you’ve been woken up five times in the night by an infant, because that’s what infants do… I’m asking that you go easy on the parent.

First and foremost, protect yourself. If the child is doing something that hurts you, stop him. Next, protect the child. Remove yourself, remove the kid, get the security or stewards/esses to help out. Giving the parents dirty looks don’t help. Either they get it or they don’t. Most of the time they already get it, and your dirty look is just discouraging. (Or they’ve already decided they don’t care, and a dirty look won’t change their minds.)

Parenting is hard, yo. Being a perfect parent is even harder. I say just accept “good enough,” and tweak the definition of that as you go.

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This post was initially a knee-jerk reaction to an argument on the internet over pet-ownership and parenthood: /r/parenting and /r/childfree had a bit of a spat when the parents brought up the fact that they spend less time with their pets. No shit.

Some of the comments seem a bit crass, but nothing that is out of the ordinary for a table full of new parents. I think our humour shifts after having a child. Which makes sense, seeing as our while lives shift.

I wanted to write solely about how child-free folk judge the parenting folk, but as I wrote, I thought, we all could use a little less judgment.