Once you become a parent, you quickly realize that activities you once considered ‘routine’ feel more like a reality-show-worthy endurance contest when you put a child in the mix. Besides cooking, laundry and other unavoidable chores, the main one capable of testing our sanity is the dreaded trip to the grocery store.

No matter what time of day or how detailed your shopping list, stepping out for some cereal and milk can easily spiral into the cart of items you swore you wouldn’t buy because your child distracted you with pointing fingers, grabbing hands or an endlesssly irritating loop of “Just one, pleeeeeease?”

So, you learn to head off the dramas you can avoid by pumping the breaks on the Whining Express (“If you didn’t bring your money with you it’s staying on the shelf. and keeping the little darlings within arm’s reach at all times, especially if they have no compunction about sampling everything in the toy section or weaving between other customer’s baskets while reenact scenes from The Fast and The Furious.

Does it avert disaster each and every time? Not likely. But keeping children in check will go a long way in making sure they don’t become a target of someone else’s wrath and fury, which is what happened in Wrightsville, GA recently when a Dollar General store clerk lost her job and was arrested on battery charges after using a belt to spank a customer’s out-of-control child.

According to Inquisitir.com, eight-year-old Logan Ivey—who was with his mother and sister but unsupervised at the time—enraged the employee after hurling a cookie at her after having free reign to “terrorize” the place. Since Logan’s smackdown was caught on the store’s suveillance cameras, she was promptly fired and arrested after Ivey’s father—who was also absent from the scene—reported what his child told him to police.

I’m not shocked at how Dollar General handled the situation, since it sounds like Emilia Bell doesn’t work well under stress and had no business putting her hands—or strap—-on anyone, a child or not. But the part that does perplex me is that law enforcement seemed to completely overlook the culpability of the Logan’s mother by not citing her for negligence.

If you’ve ever been inside a Dollar General, you know that it’s not exactly a sprawling supercenter, so what kept Mom from supervising him and being aware of, then correcting, his misbehavior? What’s going on in that household when a school-aged child thinks it’s cool to run amuck and assault strangers with foreign food objects? Bell was all types of wrong for spanking him, but his mother and father don’t deserve a pass either. Being a brat is instinctual, but acting civilized cannot be accomplished if those lessons aren’t simultaneously modeled and taught.

Since we’re all imperfect people, mistakes will be made and tempers can flare if our kids insist on getting out of order in public. But if we mothers, fathers and other members of that child’s ‘village’ decide that teaching them right from wrong is too unpleasant or invasive, someone else with a shorter fuse and a different lesson plan might decide to do it for us.

The task isn’t always convenient, but it’s certainly more cost-effective to do the work from home instead of paying an attorney or bail bondsman as that same child stares at us from inside a jail cell.