You’ve seen it your whole life. Kids misbehaving in public. Kids half-feral. Kids who aren’t listening. Kids who are causing serious trouble. Kids who really need someone to reign them in.

But when a parent or a grandparent steps in and gets upset, have you ever once in your life, not extremely uncomfortable? Even for the most out-of-control kids, when you see a parent grab them by the arm, when you hear the whispered—or not-so-whispered—admonishments, when you watch someone get in their face, have you ever thought—yeah, this is good. No! Of course not! It always feels like too much. You want to say to them, “Hey, remember, they’re just a kid.” Even if two minutes ago the kids were driving everyone in the restaurant crazy, you want to defend them and say, “No, it’s ok. We don’t mind.”

Look, the point here is simple: Whenever we see another parent lose their cool at their kids, whenever we hear them say something out of frustration and fear, we think that’s not a good look. We think, Don’t they understand that none of this is that serious? And then what do we do? We promptly do the same thing with our own kids.

We will never have the opportunity to see what we look like in that moment so we should assume that we look pretty much the same. When we see other parents say or do something that makes us pity their kids, we shouldn’t judge them—we should judge ourselves. We should feel pity for our kids. And then we should try to do better next time. We should try to remember that they’re a kid, that none of this matters that much, how anyone watching is instinctively siding not with us, but with the kid we have let push our buttons.