A mother has been praised by other parents online after she encouraged strangers to discipline her child in public.
With the rise of helicopter parenting, most people are used to mums and dads overreacting when others choose to get involved in their business.
But Karen Alpert believes it takes a village to raise a child.
Alpert shared her story on the Love What Matters Facebook page after she took her son to the local playground to play on the monkey bars.
Alpert's post begins by describing her son’s bullish behaviour around other children who were more nervous using the playground equipment.
Instead of ignoring the boy or encouraging her daughter to play elsewhere, another mother pulled him up on it.
At this point, some parents may have objected to the idea of a stranger doling out lessons to their pre-schooler, but not Alpert.
Alpert admired she “wasn’t there to do her job” as she was dealing with another child and said she wanted to thank the mother for stepping in.
The mother-of-two said: “If my kid is acting like a douchenugget and I’m not around for whatever reason, you have my permission to tell him to knock it off.
"Please feel free to tell him to stop being a jerkwad if he’s not waiting his turn to do the monkey bars.”
Alpert said she is happy for other parents to take a stand, however, she adds that this doesn’t extent to excessive shouting or physically reprimanding her child.
“Because even if you aren’t his parent, you are the adult. Which means you are smarter than he is," she wrote.
"And yeah, I know there are probably a-holes out there who would be all pissy about some stranger getting mad at their kiddo, but not me.”
“It takes a village. And these days our village might be a little bigger and more spread out and we don’t all sleep in side-by-side huts or ride in covered wagons or gather around the campfire at night and we don’t even all know each other, but we can either choose to have a village or not. And I choose to have a village.”