I have a friend who has three small children. She told me recently that before she had children she didn’t really get the things that people with children told her. She wasn’t always convinced by their claims of tiredness or logistical problems, she didn’t necessarily believe that children could squabble that much or be such hard work, she sometimes just didn’t understand what they were talking about. Even when she had two children, she didn’t really get what people with more than two children were telling her. Now, however, she says she finally really gets it, and it just isn’t like she’d imagined.

You’d have thought that if you had two children you’d know what life was like for people with three kids. But you don’t. In fact, you don’t even know what life is like for other people with two children who are different sexes from yours, or further apart in age, or when there’s less money, or the parents are working different hours from you. Even apparently similar circumstances can be deceptively different.

And we all have our own personalities and values and strengths and weaknesses. I know one person who is widowed and hates spending time with happy couples because it reminds her what she’s lost. I have another widowed friend who has no problem spending time with couples because she doesn’t see it in relation to her own marriage. Neither is right or wrong, but both have their own histories and attitudes.

So what am I saying? Essentially, don’t judge. Try walking a mile in someone else’s moccasins before you presume to know what their life is like. My own mother had one of her children adopted when he was a few weeks old. For years I thought this was a terrible thing to do. But once I had children of my own, I realized that I had no way of assessing whether what she did was OK. She already had five children, she had been widowed and therefore the sole earner (in the 1950s, when that was even harder than it is now), and she was working all hours with no money for childcare. Would I have coped any better in her circumstances? I can’t know.

This isn’t easy. I’m just saying that we should think twice before we form an opinion. I’m also saying that since we can’t judge anyone else’s situation, we should keep quiet about their choices in life. It’s not for us to tell even our nearest and dearest how we think they should act. For many of us, and I’m certainly including myself here, this can be one of the hardest Rules of all.

Think about how you feel when people try to tell you what to do. If you know what’s right for you, you don’t appreciate other people telling you what they think. They don’t understand. No, not even your closest family really understand what it’s like to be you. Even if you’re making a mistake, you still want to be allowed to make it for yourself and to learn from it. And that’s how we need to treat everyone else around us. Tough, ain’t it? But necessary.