The world is full of people with their priorities out of whack.
I used to work in a daycare center for employees of a very well known pharmaceutical company. The vast majority of the parents were highly educated, well-off, and good to their kids. There was one family that I always wanted to say something too, however. The mom was a secretary or something for this big company, and her husband worked elsewhere. They had a little boy who was about two years old when he started in my class. All three of them reeked like cigarette smoke. You could smell it as soon as the mom brought the little boy in. His hair, clothes, and coat smelled very strongly of smoke. Obviously, at least one of the parents smoked in the house or the smell wouldn’t have been clinging to him that way. Smoking in your home when you have a small child is questionable enough now that we all know what it can do to your child’s health (my parents both smoked around us all the time, but back then no one thought twice about it). What really made me mad was that this little boy had breathing problems and his mom would complain about having to put him on a nebulizer for breathing treatments whenever he caught a cold. She worried that he would develop asthma. I was trained to administer medications to children, and I remember holding him on my lap, with the nebulizer, smelling his head and thinking it smelled like the ashtrays my dad always had around the house. I never had the nerve to say anything to this mom about it, like to ask why the little boy was so exposed to second-hand smoke if he was prone to breathing problems. I don’t have anything against smokers, but in that situation, wouldn’t you just start smoking outside? Was she in such denial that she couldn’t see that maybe her son’s health problems were linked to the smoke, or at least maybe aggravated by it? She was clueless in a lot of ways. The boy was a real handful, and I remember one day she said, “No matter how much we spank him, he doesn’t behave!” In that case, I asked the director to talk to her about effective discipline methods for toddlers, but I don’t think she ever changed.