I recently moved to Chicago where many people seem to think it's their business to tell you how to handle your kid. One rainy day, I was accused of some degree of child abuse four times on my way home from picking up my son from daycare! One guard even accused me of slamming my son's head through a large turnstile at the train station. He was perfectly happy, and she hadn't even seen us go through it! Then another woman saw me struggling to prevent my son from kicking off the rain jacket for the stroller and said "your son is getting wet!" in an accusatory tone as if I weren't aware of that. She could clearly see that my son was perfectly happy (as long as the rain jacket wasn't spoiling his view). This never happened in San Francisco. When I first arrived in Chicago with my son he was an infant and it was a very cold week in April. We didn't have appropriate clothing, so we just layered everything on him and covered him with blankets over the Bjorn. In the two block stretch from my house to the train station a handful of people told us that his foot (covered in three pair of socks and at least a couple of sleepers) was coming out of the blanket. I thought that it was charming. I thought it showed civic responsibility that everyone would take it upon themselves to make sure that the child was warm.