GET OUT!

Backseat bickering bugs just about every mother, but when a Manhattan lawyer had enough of her quarreling daughters, she kicked them out of the car and drove off. Madlyn Primoff, 45, dropped her tweens in a shopping district three miles from their home on Sunday night and has since pleaded not guilty to child endangerment.

"Police would not say if Primoff ever returned to look for the girls, but they said, without explaining how, that the 12-year-old eventually caught up with the mother. The 10-year-old was found by a "Good Samaritan" on the street, upset and emotional about losing her mother, police said."

Here's the thing...been there done that. Yes, you heard me! I BEEN THERE DONE THAT AND I WILL DO IT AGAIN and dare you to get in my business. When I say "DON'T SAY NOTHING UNTIL I STOP THIS CAR" I mean that dammit! Especially if I've been saying "knock it off". I have put my kids out, granted, not downtown where they can freak me out and run into some store or get snatched up in two minutes. Blocks from home and on roads I can see from end to end. Each time I've come back and said, "you ready to get in this car and act like a passenger now" and had no issue the rest of the ride home.

Now, listen, I have no doubt that those kids will remember this incident for the rest of their lives. I have no doubt the mom will remember it, too. But can we give kids - and parents - a little bit of credit for resilience? The idea that a bad day, even a scary awful day, means a child is scarred for life just means that every day in every way we could be ruining our kids forever. God forbid we do or say something stupid, the gig is up. If you really want to punish them....take them to a store and buy yourself a pint of ice cream. Then drive them out to a country road and park 3 miles from them and watch them walk to you while eating your ice cream.

Naturally, I do not think that this mom handled her kids in a truly optimal way. But most of us have days when we don’t. That doesn’t make us criminal parents. It makes us human parents. And kids are built to live with humans, not Robo-Mamas. As I said, her mistake is in the fact that she put them out downtown in a town where at least one passerby was too nosey to actual care. Not one person said "oooo yeah, she is pissed" and stand nearby to watch the kids as she drove around a long busy block. We don't live in a world were people can put her two girls out downtown without some pedophile thinking it's his or her chance to "pounce". We also don't live in a world ANYMORE were most kids are smart enough to say, "lets sit here until she comes back" or "lets get to hiking". These too chickenheads took it upon themselves to go separate directions. Which means, mom probably hadn't done this before or that the kids are spoiled as hell and decided they would give her a scare and go in opposite directions.

Either way, the mom learned, the kids learned. If Sandra Cantu's parents were not prosecuted for letting her roam the trailer park, if Adam Walsh's parents were not prosecuted for allowing him to stand in a crowded store and play video games while they shopped, and if Gwen Araujo's mother let her walk out the house knowing what could happen and she wasn't prosecuted...well then who are we to judge a mother who is fed up with bickering and puts her kids out the car.

There I said it!