How far can we go when confronting other adults in regards to our children? Louis CK, with his kids in a grocery store, wins.

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Good parenting is a job meant for super-humans.

I don’t mean Marvel or D.C. or whatever.

I mean the real deal.

There are similarities. You can see that most parents are a bit affected. Some are plainly schizophrenic vigilantes of love in stained shmatas frayed at the cuffs. Or maybe you have another picture of what I mean.

We have to be super flexible and super acrobatic and harbor the potential for super powers used for good. Or used for utter annihilation.

Our children require us to live in multiple dimensions.

Each child deserves our fullest attention, and attention means staying an adult while having the ability to come to whatever level the individual child needs. And if there is more than one child, that means being able to switch from one dimension to another. This requires twitch musculature development in the brain, hoary wisdom, jiu-jitsu intuition, and a master teacher’s patience.

In this video, Louis CK, playing the dad, demonstrates the trials of good parenting. And he succeeds brilliantly.

While teaching the younger child how to apologize, he must reassure the older one of the correctness of the lesson without excluding her completely. He must deflect the horrid advice of others who pipe in suggestions like “Slap her mouth.” And then, just as he succeeds in teaching the lesson, a woman on her phone bumps the young daughter and moves along without pausing, without giving any indication that she realizes what she’s done. And without apologizing. And his daughter who apologized immediately recognizes this fact.

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How he handles the rest is better left for you to watch. As a parent of two teenagers, I never had to do this, and watching it, I wonder if I would have. I certainly wish I would have if the occasion arose.

How far can we go when confronting other adults, strangers, with regards to our children?

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