The Yahoo! news feed picks up a Redbook article by a mother irritated by busybodies telling her how to raise her child: “the people who pipe up, unbidden, because they see you with a child and assume you have no idea what you’re doing.”

As she lists her examples, her frustration mounts, causing her to exclaim such things as “Oh, distant relative/person whose aisle I shared at the supermarket, I’m so glad you know exactly my child needs” and “you don’t know diddly about my kid, and our relationship, and what works for us.”

She hits on some good points, but she misses the absolute worst offenders in this respect: busybodies in government and activists pushing for more power to those busybodies.

Busybodies who have no couth inserting themselves into your family situation as if you’re waiting for them to rescue you from your own unenlightened parenting can at least be ignored or told off; busybodies with the coercive power of government cannot.

Depending on where you live, they will be there forcibly preventing you from sending your child to the nearest or best local school, actively preventing you from having a menu of educational options, forcing you to strap your child in a car seat even when he’s reached school age and can therefore ride the schoolbus which contains neither seat belts nor car seats, depriving you of places to shop to feed and clothe your child (e.g., “Wal-Mart oppresses the poor!”), dictating dietary restrictions and trying to shut down select restaurants, taking other economic choices from your family because of environmentalist nonsense (which they invariably say is out of concern for the children), et cetera ad nauseam.