First of all, if you have no children you should wait until you have some to start giving advice, nothing annoys me greater than some pimply faced pleb with a degree in parenting telling me how wrong I was to do this, that or the other. I'm much more inclined to take advice from those who have been there, done it and got the t-shirt.
And just for the record, I am not the perfect parent.

Second of all, there are no perfect parenting skills for the simple reason that what works for one child might not work for another. Just trust me on this one OK? I have 5 children of my own and the variety of methods put in place for all of them is utterly ridiculous! But, they work. Until they reach the teen years...

We are all continually growing and changing. We live a progressive life and our children are included in that. So as our children grow and develop, so must our methods of dealing with the issues that arise in their ever challenging lives. So where does society come into the picture?

Society plays a huge part in the raising of our children, for both good and bad. The trouble is, when we view someone shouting at a child or giving a smack on the hand or even a little pop on the behind does it give us cause to step in and intervene? Well, I think we need to walk a mile in the parents moccasins first and then go another two or three for good measure. What I am saying here is that we have no idea why that parent is reacting the way they are. How many of us have been to the breaking point that if our child pesters us one more time we ourselves will start taking things from the store shelves and throwing them at the Prozac induced shoppers because we don't want to be done for child abuse?

But I agree that there are times when we need to step in. When clear cases of abuse are happening right before our eyes we need to pluck up the guts and send the message loud and clear that it is unacceptable. I witnessed a woman in a store actually kick her child across the floor while that child's leg was bleeding and, i am very ashamed to say that I did nothing about it. This was a clear cut case of abuse. But then there are all the other aspects of abuse to take into consideration like mental, emotional and spiritual. When and how do we step in to stop any of those? It's not a question of should we step in as the public but when, remembering that we have no idea what that person is experiencing at the moment and our own inadequacies. Again, If you aren't qualified be careful of giving advice too freely or you might just find yourself getting a bit of abuse yourself from the parent. The are obviously in need of a stress reliever and you (instead of the child) just might be the outlet...

Learn more about this author, Nathan A. Meacham.
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