When you look at your average everyday adult human person, it is sometimes very hard to detect whether all of their faults were caused by bad parenting, or by their own internal weaknesses and character flaws. Why is that guy so annoying? How come that one lady was so mean that one time? What is it that makes them they way they are, and why aren’t they more like I would want them to be? But this only applies to adults. With children, you can instantly blame any faults on the parents, as all people under the age of twelve have been well documented to have no internal weaknesses or character flaws. Those develop during puberty.
Now, you and I may have differing opinions as to what constitutes bad parenting, but there are some very universal indicators that are recognized pan-societally from here to North Korea. The first, and most obvious indicator of blatent bad parenting is when you see children running around in a restaurant. If a child is not staying in their seat, or if they are standing up in their seats and blowing raspberries at the grumpy elderly couple in the adjacent booth, you can feel free to judge the parents of that child. If you don’t want to confront the bad parent directly, you should stage whisper to the rest of your party that there are some nearby bad parents, and if all else fails, I guess just complain about them on the ride home and to your friends the next day.
The second universally accepted sign of bad parenting is when children are throwing tantrums in the grocery store. Only very, very bad parents would let their child lay on the floor and scream and grab handfuls of chocolate bars out of the display because they were not allowed to have any. Though you may feel pity for the poor terrible parent, you know in your heart that if it were your child, you would never allow anything like that to happen, and this is because you do not have any children.
Finally, the slightly less public, but no less horrible indicator that you are incapable of good parenting is when you take your child to the dentist and they have a cavity. A cavity?! Don’t your children brush their teeth?! What kind of a monster are you, that you would allow your child to get a cavity. Oral hygiene is very important! Only a very bad parent would be so lax about their children’s welfare that they would fail to notice holes forming in their children’s mouths!
So while it is still undecided as to whether or not things like being bad at sports is a result of poor parenting, you can easily use these three obvious signs when deciding to judge other parents. However, I would posit that if you are able to achieve the trifecta and get all three signs to happen on the same day (like I did yesterday), it actually cancels out the negative effects and makes you an awesome parent. I think we can all agree on that, right?