I posted today on the Chuck E Cheese topic to respond to people who were attacking the parenting of someone they knew as much about as a paragraph and a half letter written to a coporation can reveal - implying she needed to learn to "watch her own damn kids." I started my post with something I've observed as true: people love to tell people 1)how to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and 2)how to raise their kids. I should have added a third - people love to tell people 3)when they're making "excuses," the worst crime against morality and self-sufficiency one can imagine.

And any parent will tell you that no one is a greater expert on how to raise kids as someone who doesn't have any. Even when they have them, they're not too much better - my sister, bless her heart, was going to write a book on how to raise teenagers...when her two were three and five. What makes people think raising kids is so friggin' easy that they can spot an inadequate parent a mile away in a sandstorm? Not to say there aren't some parents who obviously deserve criticism - in cases of neglect, abuse, etc. But it's as if people go out of their way to criticize the average parent, as if through their criticism they're reaffirming their own superiority.

But I've learned a long time ago that nothing's harder to change than someone else's mind. So the parents among us might as well learn to grin and ignore it, and pray heartily that these people come to remember how easy it all seemed when and if they have kids of their own.